Labyrinths

This is a collection, in translation, of the short, the very short stories, and a few of the critical essays of Argentina's most avant-garde writer. He was born of mixed Spanish, English, and remotely Portuguese-Jewish ancestry in Buenos Aires in 1899, inheriting as well the flux and inconsistency of a far-flung border area of Western culture. Borges began his litarary career as a poet, and then turned to these prose-poem stories and fables. They display an intellectual pyrotechnical brilliance, carried to the farthest limit. Borge's nihilism also far outstrips Sartre or Becket, and in comparison with his elegance, invention and universal culture, they are not much more than bourgeois humanists. This Argentinian, with a cabalistic turn of mind, takes all literature, philosophy and metaphysics as his domain and they become, as Andre Maurois says in his preface, "a game of the mind". Borges seeks to astonish and does so successfully.Introduction ----FICTIONS. Tlon, Uqbar, Otbis Tertius ---The Garden of Forking Paths ---The Lottery in Babylon ---Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ---The Circular Ruins ---The Library of Babel ---Funes the Memorious ---The Shape of the Sword Theme of the Traitor and the Hero ---Death and the Compass ---The Secret Miracle ---Three Versions of Judas ---The Sect of the Phoenix ---The Immortal ---The Theologians ---Story of the Warrior and the Captive ---Emma Zunz ---The House of Asterion ---Deutshes Requiem Averroes's Search ---The Zahir ---The Waiting ---The God's Script ----ESSAYS. The Argentine Writer and Tradition ---The Wall and the Books ---The Fearful Sphere of Pascal ---Partial Magic in the Quixote ---Vale?ry as Symbol ---Kafka and His Precursors ---Avatars of the Tortoise ---The Mirror of Enigmas ---A Note on (towards) Bernard Shaw ---A New Refutation of Time ----PARABLES. Inferno, I,32 ---Paradiso, XXXI,108 ---Ragnarok ---Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote ---The Witness ---A Problem ---Borges and I ---Everything and Nothing ---Elegy.