Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

Описание: Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation.

Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors.

This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe:

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Further reading in the LRB:

Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction:
⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n...

Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life:
⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n...

Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles:
⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n...

Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle:
⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n...

Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington.

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Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day.

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