Borges, Jorge Luis (Vol. 2) - Borges, Jorge Luis 1899–

Borges, Jorge Luis 1899–

Argentinian poet (of some English ancestry), master of the short story, and man of letters, Borges won the Prix For-mentor in 1961. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 21-22.)

[Borges'] standard format is a simple, densely-packed narrative of from five to ten pages in which, almost unfailingly, he manages to present a fully-imagined new world, an order of reality radically different from our own…. Borges' [anti-realism is achieved] through a radical and systematic distortion…. Borges … works through "parables," elaborately strange and other-worldly. [Yet] a serious, even an Olympian insight into things, an evaluating and questioning is certainly present in Borges' works….

Unlike most anti-realists, the essence of Borges' meanings can be communicated in the "plot"—there is, after all, little else. The writing is explicit and pure; the dreams or imaginings are recorded with an almost pathological...

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