Search results for ""Author Jorge Luis Borges""

'Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous.'Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

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FICTIONS is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century. Influenced by writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll, Stevenson and Cervantes, Borges is nethertheless a complete original who can turn dry logical puzzles in to enchanting fables. The Pieces in this volume represent his most accomplished work.

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Borges' first collection of stories (1935). In his writing, Borges always combined high seriousness with a wicked sense of fun. Here he reveals his delight in re-creating (or making up) colorful stories from the Orient, the Islamic world, and the Wild West, as well as his horrified fascination with knife fights, political and personal betrayal, and bloodthirsty revenge. Spark-ling with the sheer exuberant pleasure of story-telling, this collection marked the emergence of an utterly distinctive literary voice.

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One of the most remarkable artists of our age.' MARIO VARGAS LLOSA THE BOOK OF SAND was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes... combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as 'The Congress', 'Undr' and 'The Mirror and the Mask'. Also included are the handful of stories written right at the end of Borges' life - 'August 25, 1983', 'Blue Tigers', 'The Rose of Paracelsus' and 'Shakespeare's Memory.

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Selected Poems brings together some two hundred poems - the largest collection of Borges' poetry ever assembled in English, including many never previously translated. The brilliance of the Spanish originals is matched with luminous English versions rendered by a remarkable cast of translators, among them W.S. Merwin, John Updike, Robert Fitzgerald, Mark Strand and Alastair Reid.

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Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-SmithMagical books, infinite libraries, parallel worlds, mazes, labyrinths and philosophical paradoxes haunt these spellbinding tales by one of the most uniquely inventive short story writers of the twentieth century. This collection brings together many of Borges's greatest and most beloved stories, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'The Book of Sand' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

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In this collection of wise, witty and fascinating essays, Borges discusses the existence (or non-existence) of Hell, the flaws in English literary detectives, the philosophy of contradictions, and the many translators of 1001 Nights. Varied and enthralling, these pieces examine the very nature of our lives, from cinema and books to history and religion. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

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The most popular anthology of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, Fictions is a wildly original and influential collection of fantastic tales, translated from the Spanish with an afterword by Andrew Hurley in Penguin Modern Classics.Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions introduced an entirely new voice into world literature. It is here that we find the astonishing accounts of 'Funes the Memorious', the man who can forget nothing; 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', who recreates Miguel de Cervantes's epic word-for-word; a society run on the basis of an all-encompassing game of chance in 'The Lottery in Babylon'; the mysterious world of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which seems to be supplanting our own ; and the 'Library of Babel', which contains every possible book in the whole universe. Here too are the philosophical detective stories and the haunting tales of Irish revolutionaries, gaucho knife fights and dreams within dreams which proved so influential (and yet impossible to imitate). This collection was eventually to bring Borges international fame; over fifty years later, it remains endlessly intriguing.Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A poet, critic and short story writer, he received numerous awards for his work including the 1961 International Publisher's Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett). He has a reasonable claim, along with Kafka and Joyce, to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.If you enjoyed Fictions, you might like Italo Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'Hurley's efforts at retranslating Borges are not anything but heroic. His visions are clear, elegant, crystalline'Ilan Savans, The Times Literary Supplement'One of the most memorable artists of our age'Mario Vargas Llosa

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Recorded during Jorge Luis Borges’s final years, this second volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari provides a wide-ranging reflection on the life and work of Argentina’s master writer and favorite conversationalist. In Conversations: Volume 2, Borges and Ferrari engage in a dialogue that is both improvisational and frequently humorous as they touch on subjects as diverse as epic poetry, detective fiction, Buddhism, and the moon landing. With his signature wit, Borges offers insight into the philosophical basis of his stories and poems, his fascination with religious mysticism, and the idea of life as a dream. He also dwells on more personal themes, including the influence of his mother and father on his intellectual development, his friendships, and living with blindness. These recollections are alive to the passage of history, whether in the changing landscape of Buenos Aires or a succession of political conflicts, leading Borges to contemplate what he describes as his “South American destiny.” The recurrent theme of these conversations, however, is a life lived through books. Borges draws on the resources of a mental library that embraces world literature—ancient and modern. He recalls the works that were a constant presence in his memory and maps his changing attitudes to a highly personal canon. In the prologue to the volume, Borges celebrates dialogue and the transmission of culture across time and place. These conversations are a testimony to the supple ways that Borges explored his own relation to numerous traditions.

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Buddhism, love, Henry James, and the tango are just a few of the topics Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina's master writer, and extraordinary conversationalist, discusses in the first volume of the remarkable new series, Conversations. The eighty-four-year-old blind man's wit is unending and results in lively and insightful discussions that configure a loose autobiography of a subtle, teasing mind. Borges' favorite concepts such as time and dreaming are touched upon, but these dialogues are not a true memoir, they are unrestricted conversations about life at present. The Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, contributed immensely to twentieth-century literature, and more specifically to the genres of magical realism and fantasy. As he progressively lost his sight he became completely blind by the age of fifty-five the darkness behind his eyelids held enchanting imagery that translated into rich symbolism in his work. The inner workings of his curious mind are seen vividly in his conversations with Ferrari, and there's not a subject on which he doesn't cast surprising new light. As in his tale The Other, where two Borgeses meet up on a bench beside the River Charles, this is a dialogue between a young poet and the elder teller of tales where all experience floats in a miracle that defies linear time.

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“I’ve just read Marcel Schwob’s The Children’s Crusade twice over, with deep admiration and reverence. I am profoundly moved: what a work! And to think I’d never heard the name of Marcel Schwob. Who is he?”—Rainer Maria Rilke Marcel Schwob’s 1896 novella The Children’s Crusade retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which—instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem—instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or delivered them to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naive faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish. Though it is a tale drawn from the early 13th century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.

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Though best known in the English speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In THE TOTAL LIBRARY, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume - all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been published in English. THE TOTAL LIBRARY presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and as the inventor of a universe that is an indispensible guide to Borges

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The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral. In these eleven short stories the quality of his inspiration is unmistakable. With their deceptively simple, almost laconic style, they achieve a magical impression that is unrivalled in modern writing.

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Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

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The groundbreaking trans-genre work of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has been insinuating itself into the structure, stance, and very breath of world literature for well over half a century. Multi-layered, self-referential, elusive, and allusive writing is now frequently labeled Borgesian. Umberto Eco's international bestseller, The Name of the Rose, is, on one level, an elaborate improvisation on Borges' fiction "The Library," which American readers first encountered in the original 1962 New Directions publication of Labyrinths. This new edition of Labyrinths, the classic representative selection of Borges' writing edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (in translations by themselves and others), includes the text of the original edition (as augmented in 1964) as well as Irby's biographical and critical essay, a poignant tribute by André Maurois, and a chronology of the author's life. Borges enthusiast William Gibson has contributed a new introduction bringing Borges' influence and importance into the twenty-first century.

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Through a twist of fate that the author of Labyrinths himself would have relished, these lost lectures given in English at Harvard in 1967–1968 by Jorge Luis Borges return to us now, a recovered tale of a life-long love affair with literature and the English language. Transcribed from tapes only recently discovered, This Craft of Verse captures the cadences, candor, wit, and remarkable erudition of one of the most extraordinary and enduring literary voices of the twentieth century. In its wide-ranging commentary and exquisite insights, the book stands as a deeply personal yet far-reaching introduction to the pleasures of the word, and as a first-hand testimony to the life of literature.Though his avowed topic is poetry, Borges explores subjects ranging from prose forms (especially the novel), literary history, and translation theory to philosophical aspects of literature in particular and communication in general. Probably the best-read citizen of the globe in his day, he draws on a wealth of examples from literature in modern and medieval English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Chinese, speaking with characteristic eloquence on Plato, the Norse kenningar, Byron, Poe, Chesterton, Joyce, and Frost, as well as on translations of Homer, the Bible, and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.Whether discussing metaphor, epic poetry, the origins of verse, poetic meaning, or his own “poetic creed,” Borges gives a performance as entertaining as it is intellectually engaging. A lesson in the love of literature and in the making of a unique literary sensibility, this is a sustained encounter with one of the writers by whom the twentieth century will be long remembered.

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This remarkable book by one of the great writers of the twentieth century includes essays on a proposed universal language, a justification of suicide, a refutation of time, the nature of dreams, and the intricacies of linguistic forms. Borges comments on such literary figures as Pascal, Coleridge, Cervantes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Valéry, Wilde, Shaw, and Kafka. With extraordinary grace and erudition, he ranges in time, place, and subject from Omar Khayyam to Joseph Conrad, from ancient China to modern England, from world revolution to contemporary slang.

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I wrote a poem this morning, and one of the themes of the poem is that languages are not equivalent, that each language is a new way of feeling the world. Jorge Luis Borges Recorded during Borges' final years, this third volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari offers a rare glimpse into the life and work of Argentina's master writer and favorite conversationalist. In Conversations: Volume 3, Borges and Ferrari discuss subjects as diverse as film criticism, fantastic literature, science fiction, the Argentinian literary tradition, and the works of writers such as Bunyan, Wilde, Joyce, and Yeats, among others. With his signature wit, Borges converses on the philosophical basis of his writing, his travels, and his fascination with religious mysticism. He also ruminates on more personal themes, including the influence of his family on his intellectual development, his friendships, and living with blindness. The recurrent theme of these conversations, however, is a life lived through books. Borges draws on the resources of a mental library that embraces world literature, both ancient and modern. He recalls the works that were a constant presence in his memory and maps his changing attitudes to a highly personal canon. These conversations are a testimony to the supple ways that Borges explored his own relation to numerous traditions the conjunction of his life, his lucidity, and his imagination.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZEIn frantic flight from the Vietnam War, Jay Parini leaves the United States for Scotland. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. The pair embark on a trip to the Scottish Highlands, and on the way the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of western literature and ideas while promising to teach him about love and poetry.Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It's also a magical tour of an era - like our own - in which uncertainties abound, and when - as ever - it's the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.

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Recorded during Jorge Luis Borges's final years, this second volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari provides a wide-ranging reflection on the life and work of Argentina's master writer and favorite conversationalist. In Conversations: Volume 2, Borges and Ferrari engage in a dialogue that is both improvisational and frequently humorous as they touch on subjects as diverse as epic poetry, detective fiction, Buddhism, and the moon landing. With his signature wit, Borges offers insight into the philosophical basis of his stories and poems, his fascination with religious mysticism, and the idea of life as dream. He also dwells on more personal themes, including the influence of his mother and father on his intellectual development, his friendships, and living with blindness. These recollections are alive to the passage of history, whether in the changing landscape of Buenos Aires or a succession of political conflicts, leading Borges to contemplate what he describes as his "South American destiny." The recurrent theme of these conversations, however, is a life lived through books. Borges draws on the resources of a mental library that embraces world literature-ancient and modern. He recalls the works that were a constant presence in his memory and maps his changing attitudes to a highly personal canon. In the prologue to the volume, Borges celebrates dialogue and the transmission of culture across time and place. These conversations are a testimony to the supple ways that Borges explored his own relation to numerous traditions. Praise for Borges "Borges is arguably the great bridge between modernism and post-modernism in world literature."-David Foster Wallace

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Dreamtigers has been heralded as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century by Mortimer J. Adler, editor of Great Books of the Western World. It has been acknowledged by its author as his most personal work. Composed of poems, parables, and stories, sketches and apocryphal quotations, Dreamtigers at first glance appears to be a sampler—albeit a dazzling one—of the master's work. Upon closer examination, however, the reader discovers the book to be a subtly and organically unified self-revelation.Dreamtigers explores the mysterious territory that lies between the dreams of the creative artist and the "real" world. The central vision of the work is that of a recluse in the "enveloping serenity " of a library, looking ahead to the time when he will have disappeared but in the timeless world of his books will continue his dialogue with the immortals of the past — Homer, Don Quixote, Shakespeare. Like Homer, the maker of these dreams is afflicted with failing sight. Still, he dreams of tigers real and imagined and reflects upon of a life that, above all, has been intensely introspective, a life of calm self-possession and absorption in the world of the imagination. At the same time he is keenly aware of that other Borges, the public figure about whom he reads with mixed emotions: "It's the other one, it's Borges, that things happen to."

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The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges’s Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

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Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays showcasing one of Latin America's most influential and imaginative writers. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, with an introduction by James E. Irby and a preface by André Maurois.Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated 'Library of Babel', whose infinite shelves contain every book that could ever exist, 'Funes the Memorious' the tale of a man fated never to forget a single detail of his life, and 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', in which a French poet makes it his life's work to create an identical copy of Don Quixote. In later life, dogged by increasing blindness, Borges used essays and brief tantalising parables to explore the enigma of time, identity and imagination. Playful and disturbing, scholarly and seductive, his is a haunting and utterly distinctive voice.Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A poet, critic and short story writer, he received numerous awards for his work including the 1961 International Publisher's Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett). He has a reasonable claim, along with Kafka and Joyce, to be one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.If you enjoyed Labyrinths, you might like Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.'His is the literature of eternity'Peter Ackroyd, The Times'One of the towering figures of literature in Spanish'James Woodall, Guardian'Probably the greatest twentieth-century author never to win the Nobel Prize'Economist

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Celebrated Argentine author Jorge Luís Borges found Shakespeare’s work so compelling that he not only fictively imagined the life of the playwright in two short stories, but also fashioned other stories and poems into adaptations of or meditations on Shakespeare’s plays, wrote essays about Shakespeare, and discussed him frequently in interviews, university lectures, and public talks. In this volume, Grace Tiffany gathers together all these varied writings and conversations. A critical edition, Borges on Shakespeare contains a lengthy introduction by its editor; annotated Borges stories, poems, essays, and transcribed talks (including his famous tales “Everything and Nothing” and “Shakespeare’s Memory”); essay contributions and one piece of fiction by Borges scholars; and a bibliography. Borges’ “Shakespeare” material has heretofore been available to readers only in scattered sources. Combining them in one, Borges on Shakespeare directly addresses Borges’ lifelong engagement with Shakespeare, an author of tremendous significance to his own work and thought, and renders some Borges works in English translation for the first time. Borges on Shakespeare will be useful to scholars of Shakespeare, Borges, and comparative literature and drama, as well as to the general reader who enjoys Shakespeare, Borges’ fiction, or both.

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