The Aleph and Other Stories

by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (Translator), Andrew Hurley (Introduction), Andrew Hurley (Noted by)

Overview

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father's “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house. This volume also contains the hauntingly brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity collected in The Maker, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780142437889
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/27/2004
Series:	Penguin Classics Series
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	174,467
Product dimensions:	5.09(w) x 7.74(h) x 0.58(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jorges Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories, before his death in Geneva in June 1986. In 1961 Borges shared the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett. The Ingram Merrill Foundation granted him its Annual Literary Award in 1966 for his "outstanding contribution to literature." In 1971 Columbia University awarded him the first of many degrees of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa that he was to receive from the English-speaking world. In 1971 he received the fifth biennial Jerusalem Prize and in 1973 was given the Alfonso Reyes Prize, one of Mexico's most prestigious cultural awards. In 1980 he shared the Cervantes Prize (the Spanish world's highest literary accolade) with Gerardo Diego. Borges was Director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 until 1973. In a tribute to Borges, Mario Vargas Llosa wrote: "His is a world of clear, pure, and at the same time unusual ideas...expressed in words of great directness and restraint. [He] was a superb storyteller. One reads most of Borges' tales with the hypnotic interest usually reserved for reading detective fiction..."

Andrew Hurley is a translator of numerous works of literature, criticism, history, and memoir. He is professor emeritus at the University of Puerto Rico.

Date of Birth:

August 24, 1899

Date of Death:

June 14, 1986

Place of Birth:

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Place of Death:

Geneva, Switzerland

Education:

B.A., Collège Calvin de Genève, 1914

Table of Contents

The Aleph and Other StoriesIntroduction by Andrew Hurley

The Aleph (1949)

The Immortal
The Dead Man
The Theologians
Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden
A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
Emma Zunz
The House of Asterion
The Other Death
Deutsches Requiem
Averroës' Search
The Zahir
The Writing of the God
Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth
The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths
The Wait
The Man on the Threshold
The Aleph
Afterword

The Maker (1960)

Foreword: For Leopold Lugones
The Maker
Dreamtigers
A Dialog About a Dialog
Toenails
Covered Mirrors
Argumentum Ornithologicum
The Captive
The Mountebank
Delia Elena San Marco
A Dialog Between Dead Men
The Plot
A Problem
The Yellow Rose
The Witness
Martin Fierro
Mutations
Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
Parable of the Palace
Everything and Nothing
Ragnarök
Inferno, I, 32
Borges and I

Museum
On Exactitude and Science
In Memoriam, J.F.K.
Afterword

A Note on the Translation
Acknowledgments
Notes to the Fictions

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa have all acknowledged their debt to him." —J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"He has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place." —John Updike

Editorial Reviews

"He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa have all acknowledged their debt to him." —J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

"He has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place." —John Updike

 

From the Publisher

Two collections of short pieces from throughout Borges's career. These offer a very broad selection of characters and circumstances. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal