Ficciones - Softcover

Borges, Jorge Luis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802130305 ISBN 13: 9780802130303

Publisher: Grove Press, 1994

Synopsis

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate 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. 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. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

About this title

Review:

Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist.” Carlos Fuentes

In resounding the note of the marvelous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterson, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, [Borges] has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place.” John Updike

These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power” The Atlantic Monthly

Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes.” Mario Vargas Llosa

[Borges] engages the heart as well as the intelligence; his genius strikes, undismayed as Theseus, through the labyrinths of our life and time to the accomplishment of new, inspiring and stunningly beautiful work.” John Barth

One of the finest, subtlest, and least appreciated of comedians [Borges is] a central fact of Western culture.” The Washington Post Book World

Borges’s composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it . . . . Absolutely and most vividly original.”
Saturday Review

About the Author:

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories, before his death in Geneva in June 1986. In 1961 Borges shared the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett. The Ingram Merrill Foundation granted him its Annual Literary Award in 1966 for his "outstanding contribution to literature." In 1971 Columbia University awarded him the first of many degrees of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa that he was to receive from the English-speaking world. In 1971 he received the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize and in 1973 was given the Alfonso Reyes Prize, one of Mexico's most prestigious cultural awards. In 1980 he shared the Cervantes Prize (the Spanish world's highest literary accolade) with Gerardo Diego. Borges was Director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 until 1973. Along with Kafka and Joyce, he was one of the most influential writer of the twentieth century.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802130305
• ISBN 13: 9780802130303
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 180
• Editor: Kerrigan Anthony