About the Author

JORGE LUIS BORGES was born into an intellectual family in Buenos Aires, in 1899. During his youth, the family lived in several countries including Spain and Switzerland. Because of his British ancestry, Borges learned English before Spanish, yet also acquired French and German at a young age. After World War I, Borges returned to Buenos Aires where he began his literary career, publishing in periodicals such as the prestigious Martin Fierro and Sur. In 1923, Borges published his first collection of poetry, entitled Fervor de Buenos Aires.

Reviews

Praise for Ficciones:  “Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist.” —Carlos Fuentes

“In resounding the note of the marvelous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterson, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, [Borges] has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place.” —John Updike

“These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power.” —The Atlantic Monthly

“Borges is the most important Spanish-language writer since Cervantes.” —Mario Vargas Llosa

“[Borges] engages the heart as well as the intelligence; his genius strikes, undismayed as Theseus, through the labyrinths of our life and time to the accomplishment of new, inspiring and stunningly beautiful work.” —John Barth

“One of the finest, subtlest, and least appreciated of comedians…[Borges is] a central fact of Western culture.” —The Washington Post Book World

“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