Collected Fictions


by Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986)


'Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes. Now we can see it in all its intense and disturbing brilliance, certain that we will never see anything like it again' - Justin Cartwright, "Independent on Sunday".

==
Summary of Collected FictionsReviews for Collected Fictions An Excerpt from Collected Fictions
The complete fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, whom Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa calls “the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes”

A New York Times Notable Book
The International Bestseller

For the first time in English, all of the best Latin American writer Jorge Luis Borges’s dazzling fictions are collected in a single volume in brilliant new translations by Andrew Hurley. From his 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges’s talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language.

For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story, Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, Borges took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.

Commemorating the 100th anniversary of his birth, this edition at last brings together all of Borges’s magical short stories. Collected Fictions is the definitive one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the Argentine master’s work for those who have yet to discover him


==
Jorge Luis Borges
was born into an educated middle-class family in August 1899. They were in comfortable circumstances but not wealthy enough to live in downtown Buenos Aires. They resided in Palermo, then a poorer suburb of the city. Borges's mother, Leonor Acevedo Suárez, came from a traditional Uruguayan family of "pure" criollo (Spanish) descent. Her family had been much involved in the European settling of South America, and she spoke often of their heroic actions.[10] Borges's 1929 book Cuaderno San Martín includes the poem "Isidoro Acevedo," commemorating his grandfather, Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida, a soldier of the Buenos Aires Army. A descendant of the Argentine lawyer and politician Francisco Narciso de Laprida, Acevedo fought in the battles of Cepeda in 1859, Pavón in 1861, and Los Corrales in 1880. Isidoro de Acevedo Laprida died of pulmonary congestion in the house where his grandson Jorge Luis Borges was born. Borges grew up hearing about the faded family glory. On the other side, Borges's father, Jorge Guillermo Borges Haslam, was part Spanish, part Portuguese, and half English, also the son of a colonel. Borges Haslam, whose mother was English, grew up speaking English at home and took his own family frequently to Europe. England and English pervaded the family home.[10]
At nine, Jorge Luis Borges translated The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde into Spanish. It was published in a local journal, but his friends thought the real author was his father. Borges Haslam was a lawyer and psychology teacher who harboured literary aspirations. Borges said his father "tried to become a writer and failed in the attempt." He wrote, "as most of my people had been soldiers and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action."
Borges was taught at home until the age of 11, bilingual, reading Shakespeare in English at the age of twelve.[10] The family lived in a large house with an English library of over one thousand volumes; Borges would later remark that "if I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father's library."[12] His father gave up practicing law due to the failing eyesight that would eventually afflict his son. In 1914, the family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and spent the next decade in Europe.[10] Borges Haslam was treated by a Geneva eye specialist, while his son and daughter Norah attended school, where Borges junior learned French. He read Carlyle in English, and began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was 18, he met Maurice Abramowicz and began a literary friendship that would last the rest of his life.[10] He received his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918.The Borges family decided that, due to political unrest in Argentina, they would remain in Switzerland during the war, staying until 1921. After World War I, the family spent three years living in various cities: Lugano, Barcelona, Majorca, Seville, and Madrid.[10]
At that time, Borges discovered the writing of Arthur Schopenhauer and Gustav Meyrink's The Golem (1915) which became influential to his work. In Spain, Borges fell in with and became a member of the avant-garde, anti-Modernist Ultraist literary movement, inspired by Apollinaire and Marinetti, close to the Imagists. His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea," written in the style of Walt Whitman, was published in the magazine Grecia.[14] While in Spain, he met noted Spanish writers, including Rafael Cansinos Assens and Ramón Gómez de la Serna