Among the best: the arcane pseudohistory of an imaginary planet (“Tlon, Ugbar, Orbus Tertius”) a memorable realization of Borges’s credo that all “new” stories are inevitably old ones retold (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”) a clever lampooning of the author’s own polymathism (“Funes the Memorious”) and a supremely ingenious detective story (“Death and the Compass”). Gloriously ruminative and bookish, Borges’s teasing fictions skillfully absorb the influences of his native Argentina’s indigenous folktales, various world mythologies, Anglo-Saxon verse, Icelandic saga, Poe, Cervantes, and Chesterton, along with numerous other literary touchstones. For this first installment in a projected three-volume series of Borges’s work (to be followed by poetry and nonfiction collections), translator-editor Hurley has included the contents of seven previously published books (notably, the seminal Ficciones, 1944), plus previously untranslated work from the 1980s (of which Shakespeare’s Memory most successfully recapitulates Borges’s urbane bridging of temporal and imaginary “worlds”).

Every purchase supports our arts programme.Mirrors, labyrinths, libraries, gardens, doppelgÑngers, knife fights, and tigers recur memorably in these witty, colorful tales-which have exerted an incalculable influence on the past half-century’s fiction.

This collection was eventually to bring Borges international fame over fifty years later, it remains endlessly intriguing. Here too are the philosophical detective stories and the haunting tales of Irish revolutionaries, gaucho knife fights and dreams within dreams which proved so influential (and yet impossible to imitate).

It is here that we find the astonishing accounts of 'Funes the Memorious', the man who can forget nothing 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote', who recreates Miguel de Cervantes's epic word-for-word a society run on the basis of an all-encompassing game of chance in 'The Lottery in Babylon' the mysterious world of 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' which seems to be supplanting our own and the 'Library of Babel', which contains every possible book in the whole universe. Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions introduced an entirely new voice into world literature. The most popular anthology of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, Fictions is a wildly original and influential collection of fantastic tales, translated from the Spanish with an afterword by Andrew Hurley in Penguin Modern Classics.

Jorge luis borges fictions