Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140037098 ISBN 13: 9780140037098

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, 1974

Few readers will want, or be able, to resist this modern bestiary. Here you will find the familiar - Gryphons, Minotaurs and Unicorns - as well as the Monkey of the inkpot and other undeniably curious beasts. Borges' cunning and humorous commentary is sheer delight.

Product Description:

A whimsical compendium of more than one hundred of the strange creatures conceived down through history by the human imagination, this unique contribution to fantasy literature ranges widely across the world's mythologies and literatures.

Review:

"It's a book I look forward to as research, but even more as a kid-at-heart fan of the unnatural, the impossible, the feared" (Andrew Pyper)

"He is one of the giants of twentieth-century literature who has vastly enriched the textures of vocabulary of our fantasies and speculation. Only Borges could dream the world with such intellectual rigour" ( Ian McEwan)

"Borges is a genius of the first order" (Martin Amis)

"One of Borges's great creations... The Book of Imaginary Beings tosses stone after stone into the subterranean caverns of the reader's mind. It takes us along passageways and turns corners to reveal strange shapes and images, some of which may precede and outlast anything conceived by man" ( Guardian)

"Jorge Luis Borges, the century's most flagrant, ingenious and industrious compiler of manuscripts that fall short of reality" ( New York Times)