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by Jorge Luis Borges
For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called "the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century" collected in a single volume.
For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare's Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.
Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges's magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.
"The erudition that enriches the fictions is certainly dazzling, as much at home with medieval Arabic science as with the classics of philosophy and literature, yet it embraced the folkish and popular as well.... This collection is a valuable contribution to the English-language bookshelf of world literature, long overdue." —The Wall Street Journal
"This ... collection of the complete imaginings of the Argentine writer ... is an event, and cause for celebration." —The New York Times
"To discover the fictions at midcentury was stunning. There was no one like Borges. Everything else, for a short time, seemed predictable and beside the point." —The New York Times Book Review
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
One of the twentieth century's greatest writers, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) published numerous collections of poems, essays, and fiction, Director of the National Library of Buenos Aires from 1955 to 1973, Borges was awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa, from both Columbia and Oxford. He received various literary awards over the course of his career, including the International Publisher's Prize (which he shared with Samuel Beckett in 1961), the Jerusalem Prize, and the Alfonso Reyes Prize.
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