In this episode, we venture into the labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges’s collection of short stories, Ficciones. We explore his use of the short story, as a genre, while following apparently endless allusions across this philosophically rich and deceptively simple collection. The globally acclaimed novelist and translator Alberto Manguel provides writerly insights on Borges, in the form of an extended reflection. He explains that Borges-the-writer was always first and foremost Borges-the-reader, and how this is crucial to his writing craft. We also hear from Cristóbal Pérez Barra, who is a novelist, translator, and doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. He highlights the power of Borges’s literary legacy, by describing his impact on successive writers from South America, and far beyond.
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Sources
Balderston, Daniel. “Fictions.” The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Edwin Williamson, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 110–122. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge Core, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511978869.012.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “A Poet’s Creed.” Norton Lecture, Harvard University, 1967-68. https://library.harvard.edu/poetry/listeningbooth/poets/borges.html.
Heaney, Seamus, et al. “Borges and the World of Fiction: An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges.” The Crane Bag, vol. 6, no. 2, 1982, pp. 71-78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30023907.
“Jorge Luis Borges.” In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, 6 Apr. 2006. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076182.
More, Nicholas D. “Prologues and the Idols of Criticism: Borges on Ficciones.” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 41, no. 1, 2017, pp. 272-287. Project Muse, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2017.0033.
Williamson, Edwin. “Borges in Context: The Autobiographical Dimension.” The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Edwin Williamson, Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 201-225. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge Core, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9780511978869.019.
