288 pages
Published Sept. 28, 2000 by Penguin Books Ltd.
Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by the writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett.
It includes, among other stories, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths", and "The Library of Babel", three of Borges' most famous stories.
Stories Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The Garden of Forking Paths The Lottery in Babylon Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Library of Babel Funes the Memorious The Shape of the Sword Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The Sect of the Phoenix The Immortal The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Emma Zunz The House of Asterion Deutsches Requiem Averroes' Search The Zahir The Waiting The God's Script Stories 1-13 are from Ficciones; 14-23 are …
Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by the writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett.
It includes, among other stories, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Garden of Forking Paths", and "The Library of Babel", three of Borges' most famous stories.
Stories Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius The Garden of Forking Paths The Lottery in Babylon Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote The Circular Ruins The Library of Babel Funes the Memorious The Shape of the Sword Theme of the Traitor and the Hero Death and the Compass The Secret Miracle Three Versions of Judas The Sect of the Phoenix The Immortal The Theologians Story of the Warrior and the Captive Emma Zunz The House of Asterion Deutsches Requiem Averroes' Search The Zahir The Waiting The God's Script Stories 1-13 are from Ficciones; 14-23 are from The Aleph.
Essays The Argentine Writer and Tradition The Wall and the Books The Fearful Sphere of Pascal Partial Magic in the Quixote Valéry as Symbol Kafka and His Precursors Avatars of the Tortoise The Mirror of Enigmas A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw A New Refutation of Time All essays are from Otras inquisiciones, except The Argentine Writer and Tradition and Avatars of the Tortoise which are from Discusión
Parables Inferno, I, 32 Paradiso, XXXI, 108 Ragnarök Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote The Witness A Problem Borges and I Everything and Nothing All parables are from The Maker
4.5 - I probably would have been better off reading ficciones. Some of the back half essays were well written but not mind melting like the short stories.
Picked up chiefly to read the short story 'Library of Babel'. It is an interesting thought experiment on futility of sorting through a very large data set.
While some of the stories were built around fascinating ideas, they had basically no plot or characters. Which was fine for some of them. Tlon, Uqbar, and Orbus Tertius is pretty good. The Don Quixote one, too. But too many of the rest also had uninteresting ideas, so I stopped. Maybe I'm just not smart enough. Oops!
