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The Aleph and Other Stories

Name: The Aleph and Other Stories
Rating: 4.32 (48440 reviews)
Author: Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges January 1, 1945

4.32 48.4k Ratings

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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.

Books similar to The Aleph and Other Stories

Ficciones

★ 4.4

Jorge Luis Borges

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)

Collected Fictions

★ 4.56

Jorge Luis Borges

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.

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

★ 4.44

Jorge Luis Borges

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.

Invisible Cities

★ 4.1

Italo Calvino

"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.

Hopscotch

★ 4.2

Julio Cortázar

Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures.

The book is highly influenced by Henry Miller’s reckless and relentless search for truth in post-decadent Paris and Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki’s modal teachings on Zen Buddhism.

Cortázar's employment of interior monologue, punning, slang, and his use of different languages is reminiscent of Modernist writers like Joyce, although his main influences were Surrealism and the French New Novel, as well as the "riffing" aesthetic of jazz and New Wave Cinema.

In 1966, Gregory Rabassa won the first National Book Award to recognize the work of a translator, for his English-language edition of Hopscotch. Julio Cortázar was so pleased with Rabassa's translation of Hopscotch that he recommended the translator to Gabriel García Márquez when García Márquez was looking for someone to translate his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude into English. "Rabassa's One Hundred Years of Solitude improved the original," according to García Márquez.

The Arabian Nights

★ 4.03

Anonymous

This volume reproduces the 1932 Modern Library edition, for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the most famous and representative stories from Sir Richard F. Burton's multivolume translation, and includes Burton's extensive and acclaimed explanatory notes.

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

★ 4.43

Ray Bradbury

Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle / introduction by Ray Bradbury--
The night --
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. --
No particular night or morning --
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 --
The man upstairs --
Touched with fire --
The emissary --
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 --
Dark they were, and golden-eyed --
The strawberry window --
A scent of sarsaparilla --
The Picasso summer --
The day it rained forever --
A medicine for melancholy --
The shoreline at sunset --
Fever dream --
The town where no one got off --
All summer in a day --
Frost and fire --
The anthem sprinters --
And so died Riabouchinska --
Boys! Raise giant mushrooms in your cellar! --
The vacation --
The illustrated woman --
Some live like Lazarus --
The best of all possible worlds --
The one who waits --
Tyrannosaurus Rex --
The screaming woman --
The terrible conflagration up at the place --
Night call, collect --
The tombling day --
The haunting of the new --
Tomorrow's child --
I sing the body electric! --
The women --
The inspired chicken motel --
Yes, we'll gather at the river --
Have I got a chocolate bar for you! --
A story of love --
The parrot who met Papa --
The October game --
Punishment without crime --
A piece of wood --
The blue bottle --
Long after midnight --
The utterly perfect murder --
The better part of wisdom --
Interval in sunlight --
The black ferris --
Farewell summer --
McGillahee's brat --
The aqueduct --
Gotcha! --
The end of the beginning.

The Jungle Books

★ 4.01

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Books can be regarded as classic stories told by an adult to children. But they also constitute a complex literary work of art in which the whole of Kipling's philosophy of life is expressed in miniature. They are best known for the 'Mowgli' stories; the tale of a baby abandoned and brought up by wolves, educated in the ways and secrets of the jungle by Kaa the python, Baloo the bear, and Bagheera the black panther. The stories, a mixture of fantasy, myth, and magic, are underpinned by Kipling's abiding preoccupation with the theme of self-discovery, and the nature of the 'Law'.

The Aleph and Other Stories

Books similar to The Aleph and Other Stories

Ficciones

Collected Fictions

Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings

Invisible Cities

Hopscotch

The Arabian Nights

The Stories of Ray Bradbury

The Jungle Books

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