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Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

Name: Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
Rating: 4.44 (33713 reviews)
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges January 1, 1962

4.44 33.7k Ratings

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Synopsis

Although his work has been restricted to the short story, the essay, and poetry, Jorge Luis Borges of Argentina is recognized all over the world as one of the most original and significant figures in modern literature. In his preface, Andre Maurois writes: “Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style.”

Labyrinths is a representative selection of Borges’ writing, some forty pieces drawn from various books of his published over the years. The translations are by Harriet de Onis, Anthony Kerrigan, and others, including the editors, who have provided a biographical and critical introduction, as well as an extensive bibliography.

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Collected Fictions

★ 4.56

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Alternate cover edition of ISBN-13: 978-0140286809, ISBN-10/ASIN: 0140286802

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

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.

Invisible Cities

★ 4.1

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"Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetian with greater attention and curiosity than he shows any other messenger or explorer of his." So begins Italo Calvino's compilation of fragmentary urban images. As Marco tells the khan about Armilla, which "has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be," the spider-web city of Octavia, and other marvelous burgs, it may be that he is creating them all out of his imagination, or perhaps he is recreating fine details of his native Venice over and over again, or perhaps he is simply recounting some of the myriad possible forms a city might take.

The Aleph and Other Stories

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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.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 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.

Ficciones

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The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate 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. 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. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between.

Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths
Prologue
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940)
The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition)
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939)
The Circular Ruins (1940)
The Lottery in Babylon (1941)
An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941)
The Library of Babel (1941)
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
Part Two: Artifices
Prologue
Funes the Memorious (1942)
The Form of the Sword (1942)
Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944)
Death and the Compass (1942)
The Secret Miracle (1943)
Three Versions of Judas (1944)
The End (1953, 2nd edition only)
The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only)
The South (1953, 2nd edition only)

The Last Question

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¿Es posible revertir el inevitable final del Universo, o el mundo debe acabar de todas formas? es la pregunta que desde un día del siglo XXI, hasta generaciones y generaciones posteriores en el tiempo, hacen los humanos a los ordenadores.

En un relato aparentemente sencillo sobre un asunto sobrecogedor, el fin de los días, Asimov demuestra, una vez más, una mente preclara y una mano maestra para sobrecoger al lector y dejarlo en vilo, incluso después de la lectura.

The Arabian Nights

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The tales told by Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights to delay her execution by the vengeful King Shahriyar have become among the most popular in both Eastern and Western literature, as recounted by Sir Francis Burton. From the epic adventures of "Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp" to the farcical "Young Woman and her Five Lovers" and the social criticism of "The Tale of the Hunchback", the stories depict a fabulous world of all-powerful sorcerers, jinns imprisoned in bottles and enchanting princesses. But despite their imaginative extravagance, the Tales are anchored to everyday life by their realism, providing a full and intimate record of medieval Islam.'

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

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Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle / introduction by Ray Bradbury--
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Homecoming--
Uncle Einar --
The traveler --
The lake --
The coffin --
The crowd --
The scythe --
There was an old woman --
There will come soft rains --
Mars is heaven --
The silent towns --
The earth men --
The off season --
The million-year picnic --
The fox and the forest --
Kaleidoscope --
The rocket man --
Marionettes, inc. --
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The city --
The fire balloons --
The last night of the world --
The veldt --
The long rain --
The great fire --
The wilderness --
A sound of thunder --
The murderer --
The April witch --
Invisible boy --
The golden kite, the silver wind --
The fog horn --
The black black and white game --
Embroidery --
The golden apples of the sun --
Powerhouse --
Hail and farewell --
The great wide world over there --
The playground --
Skeleton --
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Touched with fire --
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The jar --
The small assasin --
The next in line --
Jack-in-the-box --
The leave-taking --
Exorcism --
The happiness machine --
Calling Mexico --
The wonderful ice cream suit --
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A scent of sarsaparilla --
The Picasso summer --
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A medicine for melancholy --
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Fever dream --
The town where no one got off --
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Frost and fire --
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The haunting of the new --
Tomorrow's child --
I sing the body electric! --
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The inspired chicken motel --
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Have I got a chocolate bar for you! --
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The October game --
Punishment without crime --
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The utterly perfect murder --
The better part of wisdom --
Interval in sunlight --
The black ferris --
Farewell summer --
McGillahee's brat --
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The end of the beginning.

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Hailed as one of the world's supreme masterpieces on the subject of death and dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich is the story of a worldly careerist, a high court judge who has never given the inevitability of his dying so much as a passing thought. But one day, death announces itself to him, and to his shocked surprise, he is brought face to face with his own mortality.

How, Tolstoy asks, does an unreflective man confront his one and only moment of truth?

This short novel was an artistic culmination of a profound spiritual crisis in Tolstoy's life, a nine-year period following the publication of Anna Karenina during which he wrote not a word of fiction.
A thoroughly absorbing, and, at times, terrifying glimpse into the abyss of death, it is also a strong testament to the possibility of finding spiritual salvation.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

Books similar to Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

Collected Fictions

Invisible Cities

The Aleph and Other Stories

Ficciones

The Last Question

The Arabian Nights

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

The Death of Ivan Ilych

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