Fictions

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Jorge Luis Borges

Grove Press, New York, 1994, English; originally published in 1962 in Spanish

Fiction

ISBN: 9780802130303

From the Publisher. The seventeen pieces in Fictions (Ficciones) demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Fictions is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

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Farshid Moussavi

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The story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” contained in Fictions, explores how time, rather than space, prompts different readings. Pierre Menard is an author who rewrites parts of Cervantes’s Don Quioxte. He realizes that the only way for him to write like Cervantes is to discard his own imaginative choices, which emerged naturally during his process of writing. Borges’s story shows that an author’s version of any book will always be different from those who read it. If he had written from his own imagination and experience, Pierre Menard would have produced a different version of Don Quioxte.

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