The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges' erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.

With a focus both historical and literary, Enrique Anderson-Imbert surveys the literature of Hispanic America. His study is not merely an historical synthesis of names, titles, and dates; it is, rather, a critical analytical appraisal of the verse, prose, and drama written in Spanish in the Americas in the contemporary period.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), an Argentine writer of serious avant-garde poetry and prose, often wrote of the humor in the works of contemporaneous authors such as Franz Kafka. In response to this humor, Borges created a comedic tradition all his own. Humor in Borges studies the humor embedded in the fiction of a serious and metaphysical literary figure. Ren? de Costa shows how Borges was concerned with making the embedded humor in his work more apparent without abandoning the essential story line. De Costa examines the ways in which Borges transformed established modes of writing-the chronicle, the book review, the obituary, the detective story-into genre parodies. He looks at Borges's canonical collections, identifying the humor in such simple things as a footnote, a false epigraph, or a postscript. Humor in Borges couples elegant scholarship with a comedic edge and is both accessible and enjoyable to read. Scholars and students of twentieth-century Spanish and Latin American literature will delight in this fascinating look at laughter in the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

Tells the story of a hunchback who is a failed writer that has no luck with women. He is a self-described "Bartleby", named after the Herman Melville character; someone who, when asked to reveal information about themselves, will respond that they "would prefer not to."