"For some fifty years, in
intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short
story—from his 1935 debut with A 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—Jorge Luis 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, he 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.
"Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical
stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations
by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume
compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the
master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius." - Amazon.
Came in the mail today. It was $9.09, $14.16 with shipping, handling, and tax. I've been poking my nose around and circling the work of Borges since I was in high school, and this seems the perfect edition for finally buckling down to it. Besides being touted everywhere as a master of Fantasy (of a certain type), I've read in various articles that Borges has high praise for the work of Chesterton, and that is something that commends him to me; a friend of a friend must have something admirable in him, you would think. In any event, I can stop fretting about Borges; he's safely available in my collection now. Oh, and this is the cover I had been led to expect:
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