I first read Jorge Luis Borges in 1983 while earning my B.A. in comparative literature. Magic realism was huge and exciting during my college years in the 1980s.
We were also reading Italo Calvino, Gabriel García Márquez, Philip K. Dick, Stanisław Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Günter Grass, and many others in a class taught by a young, passionate professor, Larry McCaffery. That class is where I first discovered Borges.
We were assigned Ficciones. I immediately became absorbed in the book and its accessible creativity, with themes that included labyrinths, libraries, time, mythology, infinity, and more. Reading its 17 short pieces of prose, which capture Borges’s creativity and genius, I felt my mind expanding and moving outside myself.
I’ve read all of Borges’s books since, but I thought this experience was the best way to introduce him in a way you haven’t heard before.
These surreal stories get better with every reading, and you never forget them, because they open a door to your imagination that few writers can.
I also love that Borges called composing vast books “a laborious madness and an impoverishing one.” He rarely wrote a piece of fiction longer than 14 pages.
Here’s a list of Borges’s books available in paperback and as audiobooks.
Borges in Print
- Collected Fictions
- Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
- Ficciones
- The Aleph and Other Stories
- The Library of Babel
- Selected Poems
- Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview and Other Conversations
- Seven Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges
Borges on Audio
- Collected Fictions
- Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings
- Ficciones
- The Aleph and Other Stories
- A Universal History of Iniquity
- The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory
- Selected Poems
- Poems of the Night
- On Mysticism
- The Sonnets
Biographies about Borges
- Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson
- Borges and Me: An Encounter by Jay Parini
- Jorge Luis Borges: A Life by Emir Rodríguez Monegal
Borges Quotes
- “I have always imagined that paradise will be some kind of library.
- “Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.”
- “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”
- “Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic.”
- “Reading is an activity subsequent to writing: more resigned, more civil, more intellectual.”
- “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”
- “In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.”
- “I have known uncertainty: a state unknown to the Greeks.”
- “In general, every country has the language it deserves.”
- “The goal is oblivion. I have arrived early.“
- “The original is unfaithful to the translation.”
- “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books, setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.”
Find books by Jorge Luis Borges on Audiobooks, Amazon/Audible, and Bookstores who are not Amazon.
Enjoy this interview with Jorge Luis Borges in the Paris Review. You also might be interested in reading Noovella’s review of Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star.
You might also enjoy “Valis by Philip K. Dick Review.“
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