It was a Penguin collection, trade paperback, which I normally hate (love the mass-markets though!), but it's the first book I've read in a month or so that wasn't on my mobile, so that was nice. Paired with the prose pieces from The Maker, general theme "identity". Borges is one of the authors closest to my heart—his Book of Imaginary Beings haunted me, I could only find it by accident for years (same thing with LeGuin, actually, I never remembered the names, and only found their work browsing the shelves in my constant prowl to feed the tiger). I can't describe Borges. I can only say that I absolutely love his work. ( )

Many interesting ideas. ( )

What is there left to say about Borges that hasn't already been said?
Well, I could say that Jorge Luis Borges was not in fact an Argentinean
short story writer, essayist and poet as so many people suspect, but in
fact is a species of mollusk indigenous to tidal pools on the coastline of
the American Pacific Northwest. But that would just be silly.Anywho,
this a fine collection of Borges' work, hampered only by the fact that
Penguin's current English edition uses the same translations by Andrew
Hurley that they used in their "Collected Fictions" release, in which
all these stories also appear. Nothing against Hurley (unlike what most
people claim, there is very little wrong with his translations of
Borges, they simply trade in the poetry of earlier translations for
some verbal conciseness. Whether you like it or not is just a matter of
taste) but it makes this collection a little useless. You would be
better off picking up an earlier translation of the collection, which
can often make reading the stories a new experience in any case.As
for the collection itself, it contains some of Borges' best work. The
title story in particular contains one of his more interesting ideas,
the point through which all other points can be seen and through which
an individual can view the universe.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) ( )