Rating: Not rated
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Literary Collections, Caribbean & Latin American, Essays, Literary Criticism, Lang:en
Publisher: Penguin Books
Added: January 22, 2021
Modified: November 5, 2021
Summary
It will come as a surprise to some readers that the
greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was
not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various
forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays,
reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and
culture?though revered in Latin America and Europe as among
his finest work?have scarcely been translated into English.
Selected Non-Fictions presents a Borges almost entirely
unknown to American readers. Here is the dazzling
metaphysician speculating on the nature of time and reality
and the inventions of heaven and hell, and the almost
superhumanly erudite reader of the world's literatures, from
Homer to Ray Bradbury, James Joyce to Lady Murasaki. Here,
too, the political Borges, taking courageous stands against
fascism, anti-Semitism, and the Peron dictatorship; Borges
the moive critic, on King Kong and Citizen Kane and the
Borgesian art of dubbing; and Borges the regular columnist
for the Argentine equivalent of the Ladies' Home Journal,
writing hilarious book reviews and capsule biographies of
modern writers. The first comprehensive selection of this
work in any language, Selected Non-Fiction presents over 160
of these astonishing writings, from his youthful manifestos
to his last meditations on his favorite books. More than a
hundred of these pieces have never before appeared in
English, and all have been rendered in brilliant new
translations by Esther Allen, Suzanne Jill Levine, and Eliot
Weinberger. This unique selection, the third and final volume
in Penguin's centenary edition of the Collected Work in
English, presents Borges as at once a deceptively
self-effacing guide to the universe and the inventor of a
universe that is an idispensable guide to Borges.