Collected Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges / A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition / ISBN 9780140286809 / 565-page paperback with flaps
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“An event worth of celebration . . . Hurley deserves our enthusiastic praise for this monumental piece of work.” —San Francisco Chronicle
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
From Jorge Luis Borges’s 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display his talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.
Jorges 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. In a tribute to Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: “His is a world of clear, pure, and at the same time unusual ideas…expressed in words of great directness and restraint. [He] was a superb storyteller. One reads most of Borges’ tales with the hypnotic interest usually reserved for reading detective fiction…