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Books

Grove Press
Grove Press
Grove Press

Ficciones

by Jorge Borges Translated from Spanish by Ruthven Todd Translated from Spanish by Henry Reed Translated from Spanish by Hellen Temple

“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

  • Imprint Grove Paperback
  • Page Count 176
  • Publication Date May 01, 1969
  • ISBN-13 978-0-8021-3030-3
  • Dimensions 5.50" x 8.25"
  • US List Price $18.00

About The Book

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges’s Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Praise

“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

“These brief Ficciones have to be read one at a time, and slowly; then they throb with uncanny and haunting power. A strange and formidable writer, Sr. Borges is also a magisterial stylist—even in translation.” —Atlantic Monthly

Praise for Jorge Borges:

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

“What are we to make of him? The economy of his prose, the tact of his imagery, the courage of his thought are there to be admired and emulated. In resounding the note of the marvelous last struck in English by Wells and Chesterton, in permitting infinity to enter and distort his imagination, he has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place.” —John Updike

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

“Like the great artists of other centuries, [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

Awards

One of the best books chosen by Paulo Coelho in The Daily Week, July 11, 2008