Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed he deserved, this story writer, poet, essayist, and man of letters died at age eighty-six. This anthology of interviews with him features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work. He discusses his blindness, his family and childhood, early travels, literary friends, and struggles to find his literary identity. In depth he examines the meanings and intentions of his own famous stories and poems, and he speaks of the writers whose works he has loved - Dante, Cervantes, Emerson, Dickinson, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Stevenson, Kipling, Whitman, Frost, and Faulkner - and of those whom he disliked, such as Hemingway and Lorca. Borges expresses his contempt for Peron and assesses the tumultuous politics of Argentina. He speaks also of the imagination as a type of dreaming, about issues of collaboration and translation, about philosophy, and about time.