The Aleph

Description

Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes- dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.

Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. A poet, critic and short story writer, he received numerous awards for his work including the 1961 International Publisher's Prize (shared with Samuel Beckett). He died in 1986. He has a reasonable claim, with Kafka and Joyce, to be the most influential writer of the 20th Century.

"He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Jose Donoso, and Mario Vargas Llosa have all acknowledged their debt to him." J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books"He has lifted fiction away from the flat earth where most of our novels and short stories still take place." John Updike "