Selected Non-Fictions

Volume 3

By: Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger - editor, Esther Allen - translator, Suzanne Jill Levine - translator, Eliot Weinberger - translator

Narrated by: Diego Diment

It will come as a surprise to some readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culturethough revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest workhave scarcely been translated into English.

Critic reviews

“Dizzying in scope and dazzling in execution . . . Should throw even the most dedicated Borges fan for a loop.” —The New Yorker

“Superb . . . Indispensable to both the longtime Borges reader and the newcomer.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Intelligently selected and magically translated . . . Borges’s uniqueness in 20th-century letters is rooted in an almost monstrous combination: encyclopedic knowledge, razorlike critical judgment and a ravishing appreciation for the magical and pagan dimension in every situation.” —The New York Times

“A remarkable achievement, offering the general reader and Borges aficionados alike a rapturous glimpse into one of literature’s most fertile and original minds.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“If any recent essay collection can be considered revelatory, it is Borges’s Selected Non-Fictions.” —Phillip Lopate, Lingua Franca

“Sheer delight . . . Witty and elaborate, in turn intimate and magisterial . . . His is the literature of eternity.” —Peter Ackroyd, The Times (London)

“A cornucopia of wit, wisdom and critical insights.” —George Steiner, The Times Literary Supplement

“Beautifully translated and scrupulously edited . . . This book will in turn illuminate and puzzle, excite admiration and exasperation. Borges would be delighted with such a result.” —The Spectator

“A genuine addition to the Borges canon . . . Borges’s bravura performances raise criticism to the power of poetry and are as exciting and imaginative as his celebrated verse and fiction.” —The Daily Telegraph

“Selected Non-Fictions is the most important volume of Borges’s writings to appear since Ficciones. . . . This volume should become as essential to the English-language canon as those by Eliot and Pound.” —Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University

“Borges’s essays are unforgettable, most of all for their originality, their diversity, and for the writing itself. Humor, restraint, insight—and then, suddenly, something bizarre . . . All comparisons are deceptive: Borges, above all, resembles Borges.” —Octavio Paz

Ruined by bad narration

Obviously there’s nothing wrong with Borges. These works shed a lot of light on his short fictions as well as being very interesting in their own right.

The big problem here is that the narration is very distracting. All kinds of embarassing mispronunciations on display here… I finally threw my hands up after hearing Flaubert (“Fluh-bert”) mispronounced for the dozenth time.
Was this some sort of cost-cutting move? A real clown show.

It’s a shame that they didn’t get Castulo Guerra (the narrator of the unabridged Borges collected fictions) to read this work - not that Guerras reading was perfect, but it didn’t draw my attention away from the work every other second.