Borges and His Successors


Book Description

"In the first book devoted to the impact made by Borges on the contemporary aesthetic imagination, Aizenberg brings together specially commissioned essays from international scholars in a variety of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging assessment of Borges's influence on the fiction, literary theory, and arts of our time."--Publishers website.




Borges and the Kabbalah


Book Description

This volume brings together a collection of essays on Borges by leading scholar Jaime Alazraki. Together the essays constitute an introduction to important aspects of Borges' oeuvre, including the influence of the Kabbalah, structure and style in the fiction, Borges' poetry, and Borges' impact on Latin American literature.




Noble Numbers, Subtle Words


Book Description

This study approaches the use of mathematics in fiction in an entirely new way, as a potent instrument of language. Following Wittgenstein's description of mathematical constructs as a component of ordinary language, Fisher shows how number, geometric figuration, algebraic coding, and transcendent abstractions have been made to function as practical narrative tools. Far from rehearsing the various paradigms of numerology, whether Pythagorean, Elizabethan, or Cabalistic, this book explores the tactical deployment of mathematical objects as shaping and framing agents. It reveals how mathematical objects may be subordinated to the storyteller's art.




The Mystery to a Solution


Book Description

Irwin mirrors the aesthetic impact of the genre by creating in his study the dynamics of a detective story--the uncovering of mysteries, the accumulation of evidence, the tracing of clues, and the final solution that ties it all together.




Ficciones


Book Description

“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 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.




Everything and Nothing (New Directions Pearls)


Book Description

A pocket-sized Pearls edition of some of Borges’ best fictions and essays. Everything and Nothing collects the best of Borges’ highly influential work—written in the 1930s and ‘40s—that foresaw the internet (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), quantum mechanics (“The Garden of Forking Paths”), and cloning (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). David Foster Wallace described Borges as “scalp-crinkling . . . Borges’ work is designed primarily as metaphysical arguments...to transcend individual consciousness.”




A Personal Anthology


Book Description

Handpicked works from the greatest Argentinian writer of the twentieth century. “Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist” (Carlos Fuentes, author and diplomat). After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant “sketches,” which, in Borges’s hands, take on the dimensions of a genre unique in modern letters. In this anthology, the author has put together those pieces on which he would like his reputation to rest; they are not arranged chronologically, but with an eye to their “sympathies and differences.” A Personal Anthology, therefore, is not merely a collection, but a new composition. “An important work, by far the best yet available to the reader . . . who seeks a representative sampling of the great Argentine writer . . . the standard introduction to Borges in England and the United States.” —Saturday Review







Papers for the Suppression of Reality


Book Description

In the great tradition of Jorge Luis Borges's Cronicas de Bustos Domecq, Mad Magazine, The Onion's In The Know with Clifford Banes, Army Man, Might Magazine, Yeti Researcher, and The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, comes a work of metafiction that's so visionary, so revolutionary, that it's trite. Papers for the Suppression of Reality is a work of academic humor that's billed as the English translation of Jacques Reboul's non-existent surrealist journal Feuilles pour la suppression de la realite. Additional background: Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges wrote fake book reviews of books that didn't exist. Matt Werner teamed up with the brilliant, though embattled, yet-to-be-tenured Dr. Shaka Freeman to write one of the fake books referenced in Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote." The Jorge Luis Borges Ultra-Secret Society is proud to present this title for the first time in English. Critical reception: Excoriated by Borges scholars for its pseudo-historicism, anachronisms, and substandard grammar, Papers for the Suppression of Reality has been called "The worst book ever written on Jorge Luis Borges."What you get: Printed in California on 100% cotton archival paper with the world's largest Jorge Luis Borges-themed crossword puzzle in the back. Special editions also feature a fold-out map of "Borges's Real and Imaginary Buenos Aires." Hand-bound and individually numbered by the authors.