Jorge Luis Borges-one of the most important Latin American writers-has also attained considerable international stature, and his work is commonly cited in a wide array of scholarship on contemporary fiction. Partly as a consequence of Borges' international identity, and partly because of a long-standing view in Borges criticism that his writing is principally concerned with abstract ideas, critics have been reluctant to address the question of politics in his writing Filling this critical gap, Gonzalez begins by rejecting the proposition that Borges withdraws from the "real," and provides a detailed analysis of the various political issues that Borges takes up in his essays and short stories. The author places particular emphasis on the turbulent questions that shaped Argentine social history during the period of Borges' output.

Jorge Luis Borges-one of the most important Latin American writers-has also attained considerable international stature, and his work is commonly cited in a wide array of scholarship on contemporary fiction. Partly as a consequence of Borges' international identity, and partly because of a long-standing view in Borges criticism that his writing is principally concerned with abstract ideas, critics have been reluctant to address the question of politics in his writing Filling this critical gap, Gonzalez begins by rejecting the proposition that Borges withdraws from the "real," and provides a detailed analysis of the various political issues that Borges takes up in his essays and short stories. The author places particular emphasis on the turbulent questions that shaped Argentine social history during the period of Borges' output.

By providing the historical context for some of the writer's best-loved and least understood works, this study gives us a new sense of Borges' place within the context of contemporary literature.

This book seeks to fill a double lacuna in Borges scholarship. For one, this scholarship has been largely developed through the lens of literary and cultural studies, and not by political theorists who bring a distinct disciplinary perspective into the reading of literary works. Secondly, mainstream interpreters have overlooked or have not analyzed enough Borges’s political sympathies. This book doesnot evaluate if these sympathies are truthful to political and historical facts or philosophical theories; rather, she shows in which aspects and around which topics Borges finds inspiration and gives literary form to the political. His texts abound with concepts and events such as liberty, individuality, war, and revolution, and they deal with topics such as the legitimacy of authority, the limits of reason, and the principle of representation, among others. This book also addresses Borges’s democratic sensitivity and his critique of populism and militarism as related to salient national and global historical events that inspired his works. Above all, it calls attention to Borges’s belief in the pre-eminence of individual liberty, his rejection of political oppression, and his warning against civic indifference brought about by an isolated individualism. This book may be of interest to students and professors of politics, philosophy and literature. It may also interest literary critics and readers who want to approach Borges’s works with a political rather than a literary or a cultural lens.

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper 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. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

An elegantly hair-raising collection of Edith Wharton's ghost stories, selected and with a preface written by the author herself. No history of the American uncanny tale would be complete without mention of Edith Wharton, yet many of Wharton’s most dedicated admirers are unaware that she was a master of the form. In fact, one of Wharton’s final literary acts was assembling Ghosts, a personal selection of her most chilling stories, written between 1902 and 1937. In “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell,” the earliest tale included here, a servant’s dedication to her mistress continues from beyond the grave, and in “All Souls,” the last story Wharton wrote, an elderly woman treads the permeable line between life and the hereafter. In all her writing, Wharton’s great gift was to mercilessly illuminate the motives of men and women, and her ghost stories never stray far from the preoccupations of the living, using the supernatural to investigate such worldly matters as violence within marriage, the horrors of aging, the rot at the root of new fortunes, the darkness that stares back from the abyss of one’s own soul. These are stories to “send a cold shiver down one’s spine,” not to terrify, and as Wharton explains in her preface, her goal in writing them was to counter “the hard grind of modern speeding-up” by preserving that ineffable space of “silence and continuity,” which is not merely the prerogative of humanity but—“in the fun of the shudder”—its delight. Contents All Souls’ The Eyes Afterward The Lady’s Maid’s Bell Kerfol The Triumph of Night Miss Mary Pask Bewitched Mr. Jones Pomegranate Seed A Bottle of Perrier

Borges On Writing In 1971, Jorge Luis Borges was invited to preside over a series of seminars on his writing at Columbia University. This book is a record of those seminars, which took the form of informal discussions between Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni--his editor and translator, Frank MacShane--then head of the writing program at Columbia, and the students. Borges's prose, poetry, and translations are handled separately and the book is divided accordingly. The prose seminar is based on a line-by-line discussion of one of Borges's most distinctive stories, "The End of the Duel." Borges explains how he wrote the story, his use of local knowledge, and his characteristic method of relating violent events in a precise and ironic way. This close analysis of his methods produces some illuminating observations on the role of the writer and the function of literature. The poetry section begins with some general remarks by Borges on the need for form and structure and moves into a revealing analysis of four of his poems. The final section, on translation, is an exciting discussion of how the art and culture of one country can be "translated" into the language of another. This book is a tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of South America's--indeed, the world's--most distinguished writers and provides valuable insight into his inspiration and his method.

In English at last, Borges’s erudite and entertaining lectures on English literature from Beowulf to Oscar Wilde Writing for Harper’s Magazine, Edgardo Krebs describes Professor Borges:“A compilation of the twenty-five lectures Borges gave in 1966 at the University of Buenos Aires, where he taught English literature. Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously.” Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges’s lectures — delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition — bring the canon to remarkably vivid life. Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.

For fascism, myth was reality—or was realer than the real. Fascist notions of the leader, the nation, power, and violence were steeped in mythic imagery and the fantasy of transcending history. A mythologized primordial past would inspire the heroic overthrow of a debased present to achieve a violently redeemed future. What is distinctive about fascist mythology, and how does this aspect of fascism help explain its perils in the past and present? Federico Finchelstein draws on a striking combination of thinkers—Jorge Luis Borges, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Schmitt—to consider fascism as a form of political mythmaking. He shows that Borges’s literary and critical work and Freud’s psychoanalytic writing both emphasize the mythical and unconscious dimensions of fascist politics. Finchelstein considers their ideas of the self, violence, and the sacred as well as the relationship between the victims of fascist violence and the ideological myths of its perpetrators. He draws on Freud and Borges to analyze the work of a variety of Latin American and European fascist intellectuals, with particular attention to Schmitt’s political theology. Contrasting their approaches to the logic of unreason, Finchelstein probes the limits of the dichotomy between myth and reason and shows the centrality of this opposition to understanding the ideology of fascism. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely historical and critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.