Product Description
This unique volume presents a Borges almost entirely unknown to American readers: his extraordinary non--fiction prose. Borges' unlimited curiosity and almost superhuman erudition become, in his essays, reviews, lectures, and political and cultural notes, a vortex for seemingly the entire universe: Dante and Ellery Queen; Shakespeare and the Kabbalah; the history of angels and the history of the tango; the Buddha, Bette Davis, and the Dionne Quints.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism
Chosen International Book of the Year by George Steiner in the Times Literary SupplementAmazon.com Review
Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist,perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet hissplendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classicvolumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has givenreaders the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. Infact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected storiesalone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was evenmore staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, booknotes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he losthis sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by thedozens. EliotWeinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring inSelected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesianblowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being andnothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racialhatred and the rise of Nazism. So much for our image of the mandarinbookworm! The very engagé author of this bookseems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Eberton the side.

Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borgesbegan wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, andinfinity. Indeed, the very first piece in the collection, "TheNothingness of Personality" (1922), already finds him fiddling withthe self: "I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out thewords that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition anda few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches thatthe trees place outside my window, constitute my current I." There aremany such meditations here, including "A History of Eternity" (inwhich Borges maps out his own, disarmingly empty version of theeternal, "without a God or even a co-proprietor, and entirely devoidof archetypes"). But it's more fun--and more revelatory--to see theauthor venturing beyond his metaphysical stomping grounds. Borges onKing Kong is a hoot, and a cornball masterpiece such as ThePetrified Forest elicits this terrific nugget: "Death works inthis film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soulinto the light of day." His capsule biographies are a delight, hiscritiques of Nazi propaganda are memorably stringent, and nobodyshould miss him on the tango. True, the sheer variety andmind-boggling erudition of Selected Non-Fictions can be alittle forbidding. But, taken as a whole, the collection surely meetsthe specifications that Borges laid out in a 1927 essay on literarypleasure: "If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoymentand whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in thesecluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world." Oh, but itdoes. --James Marcus ... Read more

Customer Reviews (13)

Stylish literary and philosophical pieces.
I think it was said about Goya - He was the last of the Old Masters and the first of the Moderns. That kind of applies to Borges. He came from the late 19th/early 20th century tradition, admiring writers such as Kipling, HG Wells and DeQuincey and you can see it in his writing. His style is polished and elegant. It has a cool, sophisticated tone.

Anyway, this is an eclectic and entertaining collection. It's ordered by date and goes from 1922 to 1986. There's a lot of different stuff.It includes - essays, book and film reviews, capsule biographies, prologues, and lectures. Some of them are less than a page, few are 10 pages or more. Random examples: he reviews The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (which he liked) and there's an essay called A History of Eternity (the nature of time being one of his obsessions). Good stuff!

Couple of lines I liked (the book's got a million of em):

"Joyce is as bold as the prow of a ship, and as universal as a mariner's compass." - From - Joyce's Ulysses

"Arthur Shopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness." - From - When Fiction Lives In Fiction

Like Always, No surprises, Borges is the man.
A must read. A great selection of non-fiction material. If you know and like Borges you know you'll be pleased, if this is your first time reading Borges I guarantee that it won't be your last, you'll keep buying all his work. Borges wasn't a man, he was a library, a portal to knowledge and wisdom.

Enjoy

The supreme chef of Literary-Philosophical Delicacies
To read Borges, you become Borges. You see yourself in his mirrors, you regard the books you read as the books he reads. You appreciate what he appreciates, loving the literature he has absorbed, finding your way through the complex interweaving of his passions: Romantic English Poetry, Shakespeare, H.G. Well, Edgar Allan Poe, Dante, Icelandic Sagas, German Idealism, the Kabbala, Schopenhauer, Bergson, English Empiricism, Sufism, etc... All literary roads lead to Borges.

He lived a long, rich life. He is the Librarian you might meet in heaven. If only he were still alive to guide the reading public. If only he lived today and had a website, to think of all the books he might recommend. And wouldn't it be wonderful, to learn about his opinions on modern writers.

With the Collected Fictions, this book is a testament to the literary critic/philosphical wanderer in us all. Each essay is a delicate delicacy. This book is for you if you're a gourmand of good writing, great thinking and the pleasure of exploring the vast expanding world of literature. This book is rich, complex and wondrous. His writings on Dante and Shakespeare, his reviews, his philosophical essays... just read the book and become Borges becoming you.

What a great and most interesting writer
Eliot Weinberger has done a real service to the world of literature by selecting, and translating these pieces. They show the range of interest, the incredible ability to make inventive creative cross- connections of one of Modern Literature's true masters, Borges.
Borges covers worlds in his writing, worlds of Literature , worlds of the Argentinean society he and some of his ancestors grew up in, worlds given in a universal encycopediac reading, which seems to cover all continents and all cultures.
Borges greatest work is considered to be his ' Ficciones'. But his signature is present in all , in a single page of a book- review or a philosphical meditation.
For him worlds mingle and combine, and are retranslated in such a way as to reappear as Literature.
He also in this work reveals himself to be a decent and courageous opponent of Fascism.
He confounds and surprises us at times with these strange mixings of things, but the poetic and parable- like element is so strong in this work that it engages us, and forces us to question our own small pictures of reality.
What a great and interesting writer. What a pleasure to have this work to enrich our minds with.

Something for everyone and some things for no one
Because Borges lived and worked in Argentina, few have heard of him in the English-speaking world.Those that have are probably most familiar with his fiction stories.This book of non-fiction essays shows the vast knowledge and wide variation of interests of Borges.Therefore, this collection really does have something for everyone.Unfortunately, there are also many essays that are unreadable, some annoying repititions, and some essays are just plain dull.

So, what does Borges write about?He covers some metaphysical ground on the nature of time and infinity.He defines heaven as an infinite library, and then goes into the nature of infinity.On the more mundane end, he reviews movies and gives capsule biographies of authors - King Kong, Citizen Kane, and more obscure (and not necessarily Hollywood) films.He writes on contemporary (at the time) politics - Nazi Germany, the curators of the national library, etc.He gets intensely personal - there is one essay on the progression of his blindness.But if there is a main theme that permeates these pieces, it's his love of literature in all languages - Spanish, English (old and modern), German.He has an abiding love of the Greek classics (Homer, Virgil) and great admiration for Joyce, Poe, and Chesterton.

Unfortunately, those of us with a less classical education cannot keep up to everything that Borges says - I, for one, will never have the time to learn ancient Greek! - which makes certain essays difficult.There are other essays (especially early on) that are simply unintellegible (this may be the fault of the translators, especially since there are times when two or three essays cover the same ground with increasing degrees of murkiness).But it always happened that a real gem would appear just when I was getting frustrated with a series of uninteresting essays.

On the balance, about a third of the essays are not interesting (or badly translated, or repetitions), a third are interesting if not spectacular, and the final third have at least one moment of sheer brilliance.It's well worth buying, but it's unlikely you'll read it from cover to cover without taking a break - I took many breaks to read other things, and it took me over 1.5 years to complete the whole book.But you know what? - on the balance, I like his non-fiction better than his fiction ... Read more

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Paz, Eagle or Sun? Poetry about Mexico. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An innovative and challenging work of art
"Eagle or Sun?" is a collection of prose poems by the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz. Several of the short pieces represent a sort of hybrid form between the poem and the essay; others seem to represent a melding of the poem and the short story. Although Paz can be obscure, and even somewhat indulgent, at times, "Eagle or Sun?" is marked by flashes of brilliance which make it an important piece of 20th century literature.

Some of the book's highlights included section X of "The Poet's Works," a nightmarish vision of language gone awry; "The Blue Bouquet," which is undoubtedly one of the greatest horror stories ever written in any language; and "My Life with the Wave," a surreal fantasy story that is rich in irony. "Eagle or Sun?" may not be easy reading, but it is a rewarding and memorable work from one of Mexico's most important writers.

Past Present and Future Mexico
A superb collection of early writings from 1949-50, Paz explores Mexico from three fronts, past, present and future. Influenced by Surrealists his prose is vivid and colorful as he explores the relationship betweenlanguage and poet, reality and language and his vision of the past. Hisexploration of the apocalytic future, as foretold by the Aztec calendarstone is haunting. The world lost a great poet but his works live on forfuture generations.

One of the best books of Spanish poetry I have ever read
Best poetry and a good translation. As "A Draft of Shadows"(translated by Weinberger also), it worths the reading.These books bothare the best Paz's poetry... light on the other side... beating. ... Read more

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In this text, Paz evokes the sounds and sigh ts of Bombay, presents a survey of India''s dazzling history and polyglot society, the culture, landscape, and essence of India ' ... Read more