Labyrinths

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This is a collection, in translation, of the short, the very short stories, and a few of the critical essays of Argentina's most avant-garde writer. He was born of mixed Spanish, English, and remotely Portuguese-Jewish ancestry in Buenos Aires in 1899, inheriting as well the flux and inconsistency of a far-flung border area of Western culture. Borges began his litarary career as a poet, and then turned to these prose-poem stories and fables. They display an intellectual pyrotechnical brilliance, carried to the farthest limit. Borge's nihilism also far outstrips Sartre or Becket, and in comparison with his elegance, invention and universal culture, they are not much more than bourgeois humanists. This Argentinian, with a cabalistic turn of mind, takes all literature, philosophy and metaphysics as his domain and they become, as Andre Maurois says in his preface, "a game of the mind". Borges seeks to astonish and does so successfully.