Letters to Borges

Letters to Borges
Author: Stephen Kuusisto
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 116
Release: 2013-04-23
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1619320258

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"[Kuusisto] is a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor."—The New York Times "A talented writer judged against any standard."—USA Today Best-selling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto uses the themes of travel, place, religion, music, art, and loneliness to explore the relationship between seeing, blindness, and being. In poems addressed to Jorge Luis Borges—another poet who lived with blindness—Kuusisto leverages seeing as negative capability, creating intimacy with deep imagination and uncommon perceptions. "Alone" Today I understood While drinking tea & hearing rain That the word for birth & the one for sin Come from a single root In Finnish — that tongue they Spoke when I was small. Synnty, untranslatable, Original sin nearly, But softer, Like water Carried a long way In a jar In May. Stephen Kuusisto is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of two collections of poetry and two memoirs, including the best-selling Planet of the Blind (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). A graduate from and former teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Kuusisto now teaches at Syracuse University in New York State.

How Borges Wrote

How Borges Wrote
Author: Daniel Balderston
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 613
Release: 2018-05-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813939658

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A distinguished poet and essayist and one of the finest writers of short stories in world letters, Jorge Luis Borges deliberately and regularly altered his work by extensive revision. In this volume, renowned Borges scholar Daniel Balderston undertakes to piece together Borges's creative process through the marks he left on paper. Balderston has consulted over 170 manuscripts and primary documents to reconstruct the creative process by which Borges arrived at his final published texts. How Borges Wrote is organized around the stages of his writing process, from notes on his reading and brainstorming sessions to his compositional notebooks, revisions to various drafts, and even corrections in already-published works. The book includes hundreds of reproductions of Borges’s manuscripts, allowing the reader to see clearly how he revised and "thought" on paper. The manuscripts studied include many of Borges’s most celebrated stories and essays--"The Aleph," "Kafka and His Precursors," "The Cult of the Phoenix," "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Emma Zunz," and many others--as well as lesser known but important works such as his 1930 biography of the poet Evaristo Carriego. As the first and only attempt at a systematic and comprehensive study of the trajectory of Borges's creative process, this will become a definitive work for all scholars who wish to trace how Borges wrote.

The Library of Babel

The Library of Babel
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Pocket Paragon
Total Pages: 56
Release: 2000
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

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"Not many living artists would be sufficiently brave or inspired to attempt reflecting in art what Borges constructs in words. But the detailed, evocative etchings by Erik Desmazieres provide a perfect counterpoint to the visionary prose. Like Borges, Desmazieres has created his own universe, his own definition of the meaning, topography and geography of the Library of Babel. Printed together, with the etchings reproduced in fine-line duotone, text and art unite to present an artist's book that belongs in the circle of Borges's sacrosanct Crimson Hexagon - "books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Migrant Letters

Migrant Letters
Author: Marcelo J. Borges
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 446
Release: 2019-10-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351361589

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The migrant letter, whether written by family members, lovers, friends, or others, is a document that continues to attract the attention of scholars and general readers alike. What is it about migrant letters that fascinates us? Is it nostalgia for a distant, yet desired past? Is it the consequence of the eclipse of letter-writing in an age of digital communication technologies? Or is it about the parallels between transnational experiences in previous mass migrations and in the current globalized world, and the centrality of interpersonal relations, mobility, and communication, then and now? Influenced by methodologies from diverse disciplines, the study of migrant letters has developed in myriad directions. Scholars have examined migrant letters through such lenses as identity and self-making, family relations, gender, and emotions. This volume contributes to this discussion by exploring the connection between the practice of letter writing and the emotional, economic, familial, and gendered experiences of men and women separated by migration. It combines theoretical and empirical discussions which illuminate a variety of historical experiences of migrants who built transnational lives as they moved across Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the United States. This volume was originally published as a special issue of The History of Family.

Collected Fictions

Collected Fictions
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 577
Release: 1999-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0140286802

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For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume “An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York Times A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paper For some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books. Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius. For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Borges and the Literary Marketplace

Borges and the Literary Marketplace
Author: Nora C. Benedict
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2021-01-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0300251416

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A fascinating history of Jorge Luis Borges's efforts to revolutionize and revitalize literature in Latin America "Nora Benedict's illuminating book is an essential contribution to the understanding of Borges' relationship to the written word. The portrait of Borges as writer and reader is now made complete with Benedict's exploration of Borges as editor."--Alberto Manguel, director, Center for Research into the History of Reading Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) stands out as one of the most widely regarded and inventive authors in world literature. Yet the details of his employment history throughout the early part of the twentieth century, which foreground his efforts to develop a worldly reading public, have received scant critical attention. From librarian and cataloguer to editor and publisher, this writer emerges as entrenched in the physical minutiae and social implications of the international book world. Drawing on years of archival research coupled with bibliographical analysis, Nora C. Benedict explains how Borges's more general involvement in the publishing industry influenced not only his formation as a writer, but also global book markets and reading practices in world literature. In this way she tells the story of Borges's profound efforts to revolutionize and revitalize literature in Latin America through his various jobs in the publishing industry.

Only Bread, Only Light

Only Bread, Only Light
Author: Stephen Kuusisto
Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
Total Pages: 122
Release: 2012-12-11
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 1619320495

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With this, his first collection of poetry, Stephen Kuusisto (author of the memoir Planet of the Blind) explores blindness and curiosity, loneliness and the found instruments of continuation. Exploiting the seeming contradiction of poetry’s reliance upon visual imagery with Kuusisto’s own sightlessness, these poems cultivate a world of listening: to the natural world, to the voices of family and strangers, to music and the words of great writers and thinkers. Kuusisto has written elsewhere, "I see like a person who looks through a kaleidoscope; my impressions of the world at once beautiful and largely useless." So it is no surprise that in his poems mortal vision is uncertain, supported only by the ardor of imagination and the grace of lyric surprise. Sensually rich and detailed, Kuusisto’s poems are humorous, complex, and intellectually engaged. This collection reveals a major new poetic talent. "Only Bread, Only Light" At times the blind see light, And that moment is the Sistine ceiling, Grace among buildings—no one asks For it, no one asks. After all, this is solitude, Daylight’s finger, Blake’s angel Parting willow leaves. I should know better. Get with the business Of walking the lovely, satisfied, Indifferent weather— Bread baking On Arthur Avenue This first warm day of June. I stand on the corner For priceless seconds. Now everything to me falls shadow Stephen Kuusisto’s 1998 memoir Planet of the Blind received tremendous international attention, including appearances on Oprah, Dateline, and Talk of the Nation. The New York Times named it a "Notable Book of the Year" and praised it as "a book that makes the reader understand the terrifying experience of blindness, a book that stands on its own as the lyrical memoir of a poet." A spokesperson for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, Kuusisto teaches at Ohio State University.

Tar for Mortar

Tar for Mortar
Author: Jonathan Basile
Publisher: punctum books
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2018
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1947447505

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TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.

Borges and Me

Borges and Me
Author: Jay Parini
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385545835

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In this evocative work of what the author in his afterword calls “a kindof novelistic memoir,” Jay Parini takes us back fifty years, when he fled the United States for Scotland—in flight from the Vietnam War and desperately in search of his adult life. There, through unlikely circumstances, he meets the famed Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges. Borges—visiting his translator in Scotland—is in his seventies, blind and frail. When Borges hears that Parini owns a 1957 Morris Minor, he declares a long-held wish to visit the Highlands, where he hopes to meet a man in Inverness who is interested in Anglo-Saxon riddles. As they travel, stopping at various sites of historical interest, the charmingly garrulous Borges takes Parini on a grand tour of Western literature and ideas, while promising to teach him about love and poetry. As Borges’s idiosyncratic world of labyrinths, mirrors, and doubles shimmers into being, their escapades take a surreal turn. Borges and Me is a classic road novel, based on true events. It’s also a magical mystery tour of an era, like our own, in which uncertainties abound, and when—as ever—it’s the young and the old who hear voices and dream dreams.

On Writing

On Writing
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-06-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0143105728

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A master class in the art of writing by one of its most distinguished and innovative practitioners Delve into the labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges’s thoughts on the theory and practice of literature, and learn from one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century not only what a writer does but also what a writer is. For the first time ever, here is a volume that brings together Borges’s wide-ranging reflections on writers, on the canon, on the craft of fiction and poetry, and on translation—an ars poetica of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. Featuring many pieces appearing in English for the first time—including his groundbreaking early essay on magical realism, “Stories from Turkestan”—On Writing provides a map of both the changes and continuities in Borges’s aesthetic over the course of his life. It is an indispensable handbook for anyone hoping to master their own style or to witness Borges’s evolution as a writer.