Overview
The complete fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, whom Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa calls “the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes”
A New York Times Notable Book
The International Bestseller
For the first time in English, all of the best Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges’s dazzling fictions are collected in a single volume in brilliant new translations by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The 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, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges’s talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language.
For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story, 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, Borges 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.
Commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth, this edition at last brings together all of Borges’s magical short stories. Collected Fictions is the definitive one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the Argentine master’s work for those who have yet to discover him.
Synopsis
Jorge Luis Borges has been called the greatest Spanish-language writer of the century. Now, for the first time in English, all of Borges' dazzling fictions are gathered into a single volume -- from his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose-poems of The Maker, up to his final, and never-before-translated, work from the '80s, Shakespeare's Memory.
In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife fighters, transparent tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and the perfect introduction to the master's work for all those who have yet to discover him.
Richard Bernstein
Marvelous...one of the most remarkable writers of our century. —The New York Times
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
International literary icon Jorge Luis Borges has been called be the greatest Spanish-language writer of this century. Now, for the first time in English, all of Borges's magical fictions are collected in a single volume -- from his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Fictions and The Aleph, up to his final work in the 1980s, the previously uncollected Shakespeare's Memory. In Andrew Hurley's vivid new translations, familiar stories such as "Funes, His Memory," "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," and "The Library of Babel" will delight longtime Borges fans and captivate a new generation of readers. Published on the eve of the centenary of Borges's birth, Collected Fictions is the first book in a projected three-volume compendium of Borges's works that will include a collection of his poetry and a selection of his nonfiction writings.Readers familiar with Borges's fictions will find in Hurley's new translation a uniquely Borgesian twist: Just as Borges's Pierre Menard struggled to recompose Miguel de Cervantes' Quixote from a remove of three centuries, only to find that verbatim passages had taken on a new context, a new reading of these stories invests them with their own new meanings and contexts. Similarly, knowing that Borges intended "The Library of Babel" as a nightmarish allegory for the nine years he spent cataloging the holdings of a municipal library puts a new, earthbound spin on this intricate fantasy. Certain aspects of Hurley's translation may shock the seasoned reader: The story that has long appeared under the title "Funes the Memorious" has here been changed to "Funes, His Memory." Despite the argument Hurley makes for changing the title, the neologism "memorious" is certainly more sonorous and better recalls the Spanish ("Funes el memorioso").
However titled, "Funes" is a brilliant exposition of the limitations of language and the Heraclitean philosophy that all is change and becoming, that "you can never step into the same river twice."
Phoebe-Lou Adams
A Borges invention can start anywhere...it always takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride into some previously unsuspected dimension.—The Atlantic Monthly
Richard Bernstein
Marvelous...one of the most remarkable writers of our century. —The New York TimesPublishers Weekly -
Undeniably one of the most influential writers to emerge in this century from Latin America or anywhere else, Borges (1899-1986) is best known for his short stories, all of which appear here for the first time in one volume, translated and annotated by University of Puerto Rico professor Hurley. Many of the stories return to the same set of images and themes that mark Borges's best known work: the code of ethics embraced by gauchos, knifefighters and outlaws; labyrinths; confrontations with one's doppelganger; and discoveries of artifacts from other worlds (an encyclopedia of a mysterious region in Iraq; a strange disc that has only one side and that gives a king his power; a menacing book that infinitely multiplies its own pages; fragmentary manuscripts that narrate otherworldly accounts of lands of the immortals). Less familiar are episodes that narrate the violent, sordid careers of pirates and outlaws like Billy the Kid (particularly in the early collection A Universal History of Iniquity) or attempts to dramatize the consciousness of Shakespeare or Homer. Elusive, erudite, melancholic, Borges's fiction will intrigue the general reader as well as the scholar. This is the first in a series of three new translations (including the Collected Poems and Collected Nonfictions, all timed to coincide with the centennial of the author's birth), which will offer an alternative to the extensive but very controversial collaborations between Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. (PW best book of 1998)Library Journal
Borges, one of the giants of 20th-century world literature and a pioneer of Spanish American letters, is the master of the short tale he called ficcion. Not quite short stories, Borgesian narrations are metaphysical speculation, the elaborate working out of a hypothetical premise or philosophical concept. Published partly in commemoration of the centennial of his birth, this collection marks the first time that all his narratives, stretching over 50 years, have been compiled in one volume in English. Except for 'Shakespeare's Memory,' which appears here in translation for the first time, the other seven books have appeared separately. The Reign of Labyrinths (1964), the staple anthology for years, will now more than likely be usurped by this more modern translation, which has useful notes about Argentine history and culture. What a thrill to find old favorites -- 'The Circular Ruins,' 'Pierre Menard,' 'The Library of Babel' -- updated and boxed with lesser-known gems. An exciting publication event and an indispensable acquisition for all libraries. -- Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Library, Dublin, OhioBooknews
A collection of all of the Latin American writer's stories, from 1935 through 1983, in new translation. A section of notes on the stories reveals insights in Argentinian history, literature, and culture. Includes the previously uncollected Shakespeare's Memory (1983). This is the first installment of the publisher's three-volume publication project of the works of Borges. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Jamie James
Dazzling. . .Collected Fictions gathers together all of Borges' fictions, newly translated with stylish scrupulosity by Andrew Hurley.— The Wall Street Journal
Marc Berley
It offers, in one volume and in a fine translation by Andrew Hurley, all of Borges's remarkable and often indelible meditations on time, memory, infinity, the meaning of life, the value of art, chance, morality, and other subjects that are as fit for philosophical as for literary investigation.— Commentary
Mavis Gallant
Some [of these stories] stand among the great short fiction of the century....There was no one like Borges.— The New York Times Book Review
Melvin Jules Bukiet
An unparalleled treasury of marvels...Borges is more than a stunning storyteller and a brilliant stylist, he's a human mirror who reflects the spirit of his time.— Chicago Tribune Books
Phoebe-Lou Adams
A Borges invention can start anywhere...it always takes the reader on a roller-coaster ride into some previously unsuspected dimension.— The Atlantic Monthly
Richard Bernstein
Marvelous...one of the most remarkable writers of our century.— The New York Times
Kirkus Reviews
Mirrors, labyrinths, libraries, gardens, doppelgangers, knife fights, and tigers recur memorably in these witty, colorful tales that have exerted an incalculable influence on the past half-century's fiction. For this first installment in a projected three-volume series of Borges' work (to be followed by poetry and nonfiction collections), translator-editor Hurley has included the contents of seven previously published books (notably, the seminal Ficciones), plus previously untranslated work from the '80s (of which Shakespeare's Memory most successfully recapitulates Borges' urbane bridging of temporal and imaginary 'worlds').Gloriously ruminative and bookish, Borges's teasing fictions skillfully absorb the influences of his native Argentina's indigenous folktales, various world mythologies, Anglo-Saxon verse, Icelandic saga, Poe, Cervantes, and Chesterton, along with numerous other literary touchstones. Among the best: the arcane pseudo-history of an imaginary planet ('Tlon, Ugbar, Orbus Tertius'); a memorable realization of Borges's credo that all 'new' stories are inevitably old ones retold ('Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote'); a clever lampooning of the author's own polymathism ('Funes the Memorious'); and a supremely ingenious detective story ('Death and the Compass'). Authoritative testimony to the virtues of eclecticism and cosmopolitanism, and a matchless gift to readers that belongs, as the old saying goes, in every library.