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.

"He more than anyone renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists. Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, José 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

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine poet, essayist, and author of short stories. His most notable works as a key literary Spanish-language figure of the twentieth century include Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph). He received a BA from the College of Geneva. He was also appointed the director of the National Public Library and professor of English literature at the University of Buenos Aries in 1955. During his lifetime, Borges received the first Prix International Formentor Prize which he shared alongside Samuel Beckett in 1961. He also received the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in 1971. View titles by Jorge Luis Borges

The Aleph and Other StoriesIntroduction by Andrew Hurley

The Aleph (1949)

The Immortal
The Dead Man
The Theologians
Story of the Warrior and the Captive Maiden
A Biography of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)
Emma Zunz
The House of Asterion
The Other Death
Deutsches Requiem
Averroës' Search
The Zahir
The Writing of the God
Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth
The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths
The Wait
The Man on the Threshold
The Aleph
Afterword

The Maker (1960)

Foreword: For Leopold Lugones
The Maker
Dreamtigers
A Dialog About a Dialog
Toenails
Covered Mirrors
Argumentum Ornithologicum
The Captive
The Mountebank
Delia Elena San Marco
A Dialog Between Dead Men
The Plot
A Problem
The Yellow Rose
The Witness
Martin Fierro
Mutations
Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote
Paradiso, XXXI, 108
Parable of the Palace
Everything and Nothing
Ragnarök
Inferno, I, 32
Borges and I

Museum
On Exactitude and Science
In Memoriam, J.F.K.
Afterword

A Note on the Translation
Acknowledgments
Notes to the Fictions

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