THE TOTAL LIBRARY

Description

Though best known in the English-speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In The Total Library, more than 150 of Borges’s most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume—all in superb new translations. More than a hundred of the pieces have never previously been published in English. The Total Library presents Borges at once as a deceptively self-effacing guide to the universe and as the inventor of a universe that is an indispensible guide to Borges

Author bio

JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899-1986). Argentine poet, novelist, essayist, a pioneer of Magic Realism, and one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. He had a particular love of English literature. His philosophical influences include Kabbalistic thought, Swedenborg, Berkeley and other Idealist philosophers. His interest in Swedenborg is apparent from his essay ‘Testimony to the Invisible’ and the sonnet ‘Emanuel Swedenborg’.

References: Testimony to the Invisible  and ‘Swedenborg and Borges: the Mystic of the North and the Mystic in puribus‘, in In Search of the Absolute: Essays On Swedenborg and Literature (London: Swedenborg Society, 2004); and J L Borges, The Total Library, ed. Eliot Weinbeger (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2000).