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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800-1900'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aguafuertes Portenas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Autobiography of Red'
Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red is a novel in verse, the author's first. A classicist by profession as well as a poet, Carson has drawn on antiquity for her cast, updating the myth of Geryon and Herakles. In the original version, of course, Herakles killed the red-skinned, winged Geryon. In Carson's very contemporary retelling, he merely inspires, but does not return, the monster's passion. By choosing Geryon as her central character, Carson can bring up the questions of existence as if they hadn't been asked before. After all, the monster's instincts have not been numbed by civilization. Fires twist through him. We feel the pain of learning the most elementary things, and then the volcanic intensity that comes with that more advanced thing, love. Yet Carson doesn't so much tell the story of Geryon's love as mediate his very being through semiological surfaces: cafes, video stores, lipstick, a library where he shelves government documents with a "forlorn austerity, / tall and hushed in their ranges as veterans of a forgotten war." Carson seldom satisfies herself with an image of the world. Instead she atomizes the world, leaving it broken down, refracted, and glinting. At times her verbal pyrotechnics manage to render pure energy:
A little button at the end of each range activated the fluorescent track above it.No novelist could have gotten away with that last line. Yet it's very much to the point: Carson's Geryon is, among other things, a camera freak who doesn't understand that an observer must inevitably alter the nature of the thing observed. Here is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, cheek-by-jowl with the ancients! And indeed, Carson's achievement is to interweave the archaic and the modern so seamlessly that by the time we finish reading Autobiography of Red, the entire landscape looks inside out. --Mark Rudman [via]
A yellowing 5 x 7 index card
Scotch-taped below each button said EXTINGUISH LIGHT WHEN NOT IN USE.
Geryon went flickering
through the ranges like a bit of mercury flipping the switches on and off.
The librarians thought him
a talented boy with a shadow side.
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy: An Investigative Reporter Exposes the Truth About Globalization, Corporate Cons, and High Finance Fraudsters'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Blow-Up'
titled Blow-Up: And Other Stories, paperback 288 pages, by julio cortazar [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Book of Sand'

› Find signed collectible books: 'Buenos Aires: A Cultural and Literary Companion'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Buenos Aires Quintet'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Buenos Aires Quintet'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Call to Discipleship'
The book thousands have been waiting for- from practical experience [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
Political satire doesn't age well, but occasionally a diatribe contains enough art and universal mirth to survive long after its timeliness has passed. Candide is such a book. Penned by that Renaissance man of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Candide is steeped in the political and philosophical controversies of the 1750s. But for the general reader, the novel's driving principle is clear enough: the idea (endemic in Voltaire's day) that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and apparent folly, misery and strife are actually harbingers of a greater good we cannot perceive, is hogwash.
Telling the tale of the good-natured but star-crossed Candide (think Mr. Magoo armed with deadly force), as he travels the world struggling to be reunited with his love, Lady Cunegonde, the novel smashes such ill-conceived optimism to splinters. Candide's tutor, Dr. Pangloss, is steadfast in his philosophical good cheer, in the face of more and more fantastic misfortune; Candide's other companions always supply good sense in the nick of time. Still, as he demolishes optimism, Voltaire pays tribute to human resilience, and in doing so gives the book a pleasant indomitability common to farce. Says one character, a princess turned one-buttocked hag by unkind Fate: "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"--Michael Gerber [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
Candide, Voltaire's biting portrayal of eighteenth-century European society, is a central text of the Enlightenment and essential reading for history students today. Preserving the text's provocative nature, Daniel Gordon's new translation enhances Candide's read-ability and highlights the text's wit and satire for twentieth-century readers. The introduction places the work and its author in historical context, showing students how the complexities of Voltaire's life relate to the events, philosophy, and characters of Candide. A related documents section - with personal correspondence to and from Voltaire - gives students another lens through which to view this influential thinker. Helpful editorial features include explanatory notes throughout the text and a chronology of Voltaire's life. [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
Political satire doesn't age well, but occasionally a diatribe contains enough art and universal mirth to survive long after its timeliness has passed. Candide is such a book. Penned by that Renaissance man of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Candide is steeped in the political and philosophical controversies of the 1750s. But for the general reader, the novel's driving principle is clear enough: the idea (endemic in Voltaire's day) that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and apparent folly, misery and strife are actually harbingers of a greater good we cannot perceive, is hogwash.
Telling the tale of the good-natured but star-crossed Candide (think Mr. Magoo armed with deadly force), as he travels the world struggling to be reunited with his love, Lady Cunegonde, the novel smashes such ill-conceived optimism to splinters. Candide's tutor, Dr. Pangloss, is steadfast in his philosophical good cheer, in the face of more and more fantastic misfortune; Candide's other companions always supply good sense in the nick of time. Still, as he demolishes optimism, Voltaire pays tribute to human resilience, and in doing so gives the book a pleasant indomitability common to farce. Says one character, a princess turned one-buttocked hag by unkind Fate: "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"--Michael Gerber [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
In this new translation of Voltaires Candide, distinguished translator Burton Raffel captures the French novels irreverent spirit and offers a vivid, contemporary version of the 250-year-old text. Raffel casts the novel in an English idiom that--had Voltaire been a twenty-first-century American--he might himself have employed. The translation is immediate and unencumbered, and for the first time makes Voltaire the satirist a wicked pleasure for English-speaking readers.
Candide recounts the fantastically improbable travels, adventures, and misfortunes of the young Candide, his beloved Cunégonde, and his devoutly optimistic tutor, Pangloss. Endowed at the start with good fortune and every prospect for happiness and success, the characters nevertheless encounter every conceivable misfortune. Voltaires philosophical tale, in part an ironic attack on the optimistic thinking of such figures as G. W. Leibniz and Alexander Pope, has proved enormously influential over the years. In a general introduction to this volume, historian Johnson Kent Wright places Candide in the contexts of Voltaires life and work and the Age of Enlightenment.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
One of the finest satires ever written, Voltaires Candide savagely skewers this very optimistic approach to life as a shamefully inadequate response to human suffering. The swift and lively tale follows the absurdly melodramatic adventures of the youthful Candide, who is forced into the army, flogged, shipwrecked, betrayed, robbed, separated from his beloved Cunégonde, and tortured by the Inquisition. As Candide experiences and witnesses calamity upon calamity, he begins to discover thatcontrary to the teachings of his tutor, Dr. Panglossall is perhaps not always for the best. After many trials, travails, and incredible reversals of fortune, Candide and his friends finally retire together to a small farm, where they discover that the secret of happiness is simply to cultivate one's garden, a philosophy that rejects excessive optimism and metaphysical speculation in favor of the most basic pragmatism.
Filled with wit, intelligence, and an abundance of dark humor, Candide is relentless and unsparing in its attacks upon corruption and hypocrisyin religion, government, philosophy, science, and even romance. Ultimately, this celebrated work says that it is possible to challenge blind optimism without losing the will to live and pursue a happy life.
Gita May is Professor of French at Columbia University. She has published extensively on the French Enlightenment, eighteenth-century aesthetics, the novel and autobiography, and women in literature, history, and the arts.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide and Other Tales'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide and Related Texts'
This lively new translation of Voltaire's satiric masterpiece is accompanied by a short selection of writings of each of the most prominent optimists to whom Voltaire was responding -- Leibniz, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, Pope, Wolff, Rousseau, and Malebranche -- and thus offers a better perspective of the intellectual context in which Candide was written, and of its place in Enlightenment though, than does any other edition. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide or Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism'
Robert M. Adams's superlative revised translation of Candide provides the basis for this widely adopted Norton Critical Edition.
The accompanying apparatus has been revised in accordance with recent biographical and critical materials. The Backgrounds and Criticism sections provide important essays that shed light on major critical issues relevant to Candide and to the intellectual climate of the period. In addition to the reports of five English visitors to Ferney, essays by Haydn Mason, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Cassirer, and Robert M. Adams are included. The final section of the edition, "The Climate of Controversy," summarizes the debate surrounding Voltaire's works and includes essays by Peter Gay, Raymond Naves, Gustave Lanson, and John Morley. Also included are a series of quotations about Voltaire by such prominent figures as Gustave Flaubert, Frederick the Great, and Stendhal, as well as the text of "Pangloss's Song," a ballad from the 1956 Candide-based operetta by Richard Wilbur. [via]More editions of Candide or Optimism: A Fresh Translation, Backgrounds, Criticism:
› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide : Or, Optimism'
In this splendid new translation of Voltaires satiric masterpiece, all the celebrated wit, irony, and trenchant social commentary of one of the great works of the Enlightenment is restored and refreshed.
Voltaire may have cast a jaundiced eye on eighteenth-century Europea place that was definitely not the best of all possible worlds. But amid its decadent society, despotic rulers, civil and religious wars, and other ills, Voltaire found a mother lode of comic material. And this is why Peter Constantines thoughtful translation is such a pleasure, presenting all the books subtlety and ribald joys precisely as Voltaire had intended.
The globe-trotting misadventures of the youthful Candide; his tutor, Dr. Pangloss; Martin, and the exceptionally trouble-prone object of Candides affections, Cunégonde, as they brave exile, destitution, cannibals, and numerous deprivation, provoke both belly laughs and deep contemplation about the roles of hope and suffering in human life.
The transformation of Candides outlook from panglossian optimism to realism neatly lays out Voltaires philosophythat even in Utopia, life is less about happiness than survivalbut not before providing us with one of literatures great and rare pleasures. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide Ou L'Optimisme'
This edition is essentially that of Richard Aldington edited with reference to the French editions by Andr Morize and George R. Havens. Norman L. Torrey's introduction is a brief commentary on Voltaire's central purpose of reducing the doctrine of philosophical optimism to absurdity. Also included are a list of principal dates in the life of Voltaire and a selected bibliography. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cliffsnotes Candide'
CliffsNotes on Candide explores the best known philosophic tale from Voltaire. The tale is a vehicle for his profoundest views on politics, religion, and philosophy. At the same time, it is an adventure tale about a young hero who travels far and wide and experiences great dangers.
With this study guide, youll see why Voltaire is considered among the greatest satirists in literature. Along with detailed explanations of the plot, your understanding will increase with insight into the life and times of the author. Other features that help you study include
Classic literature or modern modern-day treasure you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides.
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Fictions'
Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.
By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.
But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Fictions'
Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.
By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.
But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cronicas del Angel Gris'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'El Libro De Arena'
This title is out of print. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Everything and Nothing'
"Some of the most witty, uncannily original short fiction in Western Literature."The New Yorker
Celebrating the centennial of his birth, Everything and Nothing compiles the most anthologized and widely read fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, "a giant of world literature" (John Updike, The New Yorker). Some of the narrative pieces herein contained are: "Pierre Menard" in which a modern writer reconstructs passages from Don Quixote that are verbally identical but read differently; "The Garden of Forking Paths," an intellectual variation on the detective-story genre; and "Nightmares," a lecture which, as Alastair Reid puts it, "shifts from personal memories to writers, to an examination of other peoples' metaphors, to language itself." Everything and Nothing serves as a perfect introduction to Borges's genius. [via]More editions of Everything and Nothing:
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Gaucho Martin Fierro'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hopscotch'
Translated by Gregory Rabassa, winner of the National Book Award for Translation, 1967
Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinian writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves "the Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and prompt Oliveira to return to Buenos Aires, where he works by turns as a salesman, a keeper of a circus cat which can truly count, and an attendant in an insane asylum. Hopscotch is the dazzling, freewheeling account of Oliveira's astonishing adventures. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hopscotch'
This is the tragic history of two men and their circle of friends who live in Buenos Aires and Paris. Anticipating the age of the Web with a non-structure that allows readers to take the chapters in any order they wish, the book invites them to be the architects of the novel themselves. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Las Noches De Flores/ the Nights of Flowers'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lonely Planet Buenos Aires'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Martin Fierro'
The Martin Fierro, the classic argentine poem, has been the subject of studies and discussions ever since the issuing of its first part edition -el gaucho Martin Fierro- in 1873, and there have been many ensuing editions, including some still available, to prove it. This new edition of both parts aims to render a balanced startpoint to the study of the literary piece. This edition is based on the original texts: El gaucho Martín Fierro Imprenta de La Pampa, 1872, and La vuelta de Martín Fierro Librería del Plata, 1879, and includes no less than 535 lexicographic notes, conveniently placed at the bottom of the pages and intended to help the modern reader grasp the exact meaning of the text without obtrusive lengthy interruptions. The notes were made by comparing the critical editions by Eleuterio F. Tiscornia, Ed. Losada, Buenos Aires, 1941; by Carlos Alberto Leumann, Ed. Angel de Estrada, Buenos Aires, 1945; and by Santiago M. Lugones, Ed. Centurión, Buenos Aires, 1948; their own notes compared between them and with the critical edition by Elida Lois and Angel Nuñez, Ed. ALLCA XX (Association Archives de la Littérature Latinoaméricaine, des Caraïbes et Africaine du XX Siècle), Paris 2001; with the notes by Leopoldo Lugones in El payador, Ed. Centurión, Bs. As. 1948 (and Stockcero 2004), those of Francisco Castro in Vocabulario y frases del Martín Fierro, Ed. Kraft, Bs. As. 1950, and those of Domingo Bravo in El Quichua en el Martín Fierro y Don Segundo Sombra, Ed. Instituto Amigos del Libro Argentino, Bs. As. 1968. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nemesis: Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, And The Love Triangle That Brought Down The Kennedys'
Peter Evans's biography of Aristotle Onassis, "Ari," met with great acclaim when it was published in 1986. Ari provided the world with an unprecedented glimpse of the Greek shipping magnate's orbit of dizzying wealth, twisted intrigues, and questionable mores. Not long after the book appeared, however, Onassis's daughter Christina and his longtime business partner Yannis Georgakis hinted to Evans that he had missed the "real story" -- one that proved Onassis's intrigues had deadly results. "I must begin," Georgakis said, "with the premise that, for Onassis, Bobby Kennedy was unfinished business from way back..."
His words launched Evans into the heart of a story that tightly bound Onassis not to Jackie's first husband, but to his ambitious younger brother Bobby. A bitter rivalry emerged between Bobby and Ari long before Onassis and Jackie had even met. "Nemesis" reveals the tangled thread of events that linked two of the world's most powerful men in their intense hatred for one another and uncovers the surprising role played by the woman they both loved. Their power struggle unfolds against a heady backdrop of international intrigue: Bobby Kennedy's discovery of the Greek shipping magnate's shady dealings, which led him to bar Onassis from trade with the United States; Onassis's attempt to control much of Saudi Arabia's oil; Onassis's untimely love affair with Jackie's married sister Lee Radziwill; and his bold invitation to First Lady Jackie to join him on his yacht -- without the president. Just as the self-made Greek tycoon gloried in the chance to stir the wrath of the Kennedys, they struggled unsuccessfully to break his spell over the woman who held the key to all of theirfutures. After Jack's death, Bobby became ever closer to Camelot's holy widow, and fought to keep her from marrying his sworn rival. But Onassis rarely failed to get what he wanted, and Jackie became his wife shortly after Bobby was killed.
Through extensive interviews with the closest friends, lovers, and relatives of Onassis and the Kennedys, longtime journalist Evans has uncovered the shocking culmination of the Kennedy-Onassis-Kennedy love triangle: Aristotle Onassis was at the heart of the plot to kill Bobby Kennedy. Meticulously tracing Onassis's connections in the world of terrorism, "Nemesis" presents compelling evidence that he financed the assassination -- including a startling confession that has gone unreported for nearly three decades. Along the way, this groundbreaking work also daringly paints these international icons in all of their true colors. From Evans's deeply nuanced portraits of the charismatic Greek shipping magnate and his acquisitive iconic bride to his probing and revelatory look into the events that shaped an era, "Nemesis" is a work that will not be soon forgotten. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'On Heroes and Tombs'
› Find signed collectible books: 'Rayuela'
A must-have classic of Latin American literature. Horacio Oliveira is an Argentinean writer who lives in Paris with his mistress, La Maga, surrounded by a loose-knit circle of bohemian friends who call themselves The Club." A child's death and La Maga's disappearance put an end to his life of empty pleasures and intellectual acrobatics, and returns to Buenos Aires. Rayuela is the dazzling, free-wheeling account of his astonishing adventures.
Description in Spanish:
Es reconocida corno la obra maestra de Julio Cortazar. De entrada, el nos propone elegir uno de los dos accesos: leer en el orden acostumbrado y acabar en el capitulo 56 (al que siguen mas capitulos, que denomina como prescindibles), o bien, seguir el tablero de direccion, que nos remite de un capitulo a otro, pasando por variadas trampas o juegos: una omision aparente, un doble y significativo envio... Esto nos ofrece, en principio, dos libros distintos. Rayuela, sin embargo, se bifurca a su vez en dos ambientes fisicos: el Del lado de alla, en Paris, con la relacion de Oliveira y la Maga, el club de la serpiente, el primer descenso a los infiernos de Horacio, etcetera; y el Del lado de aqui, en Buenos Aires, con el encuentro de Traveler y Talita, el circo, el manicomio, el segundo descenso... Estilo y estructura, dice Nabokov, hacen la novela. La perfeccion que alcanzan en RayueIa nos coloca (y esto fue claro desde que vio la luz, en 1963) ante una de las mejores novelas escritas en nuestra lengua. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Non-Fictions'
Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism. So much for our image of the mandarin bookworm! The very engagé author of this book seems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Ebert on the side.
Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borges began wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, and infinity. Indeed, the very first piece in the collection, "The Nothingness of Personality" (1922), already finds him fiddling with the self: "I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I." There are many such meditations here, including "A History of Eternity" (in which Borges maps out his own, disarmingly empty version of the eternal, "without a God or even a co-proprietor, and entirely devoid of archetypes"). But it's more fun--and more revelatory--to see the author venturing beyond his metaphysical stomping grounds. Borges on King Kong is a hoot, and a cornball masterpiece such as The Petrified Forest elicits this terrific nugget: "Death works in this film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day." His capsule biographies are a delight, his critiques of Nazi propaganda are memorably stringent, and nobody should miss him on the tango. True, the sheer variety and mind-boggling erudition of Selected Non-Fictions can be a little forbidding. But, taken as a whole, the collection surely meets the specifications that Borges laid out in a 1927 essay on literary pleasure: "If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world." Oh, but it does. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sobre Heroes Y Tumbas'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tango Lesson'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tango Singer'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Voltaire: Candide'
Brought up in the household of a powerful Baron, Candide is an open-minded young man, whose tutor, Pangloss, has instilled in him the belief that 'all is for the best'. But when his love for the Baron's rosy-cheeked daughter is discovered, Candide is cast out to make his own way in the world. And so he and his various companions begin a breathless tour of Europe, South America and Asia, as an outrageous series of disasters befall them - earthquakes, syphilis, a brush with the Inquisition, murder - sorely testing the young hero's optimism. [via]
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The novella begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism (or simply optimism) by his mentor, Pangloss. The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow, painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes with Candide, if not outright rejecting optimism, advocating an enigmatic precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds".
Desde un punto de vista sardónico, la obra sigue las peripecias del protagonista Cándido en su primer encuentro con el precepto del optimismo leibniziano de que «todo sucede para bien en este, el mejor de los mundos posibles» y en una serie de aventuras subsecuentes que refutan de forma dramática el famoso precepto a pesar del obstinamiento con el que el personaje se aferra a éste.
La novela satiriza la filosofía de Leibniz, y es un muestrario de los horrores del mundo del siglo XVIII. En Cándido, Leibniz está representado por el filósofo Pangloss, tutor del protagonista. A pesar de observar y experimentar una serie de infortunios, Pangloss afirma repetidamente que «tout est au mieux» («todo sucede para bien») y que vive en «le meilleur des mondes possibles» («el mejor de los mundos posibles»).
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Sobre heroes y tumbas contracoberta 910923 Un Apocalipsis de nuestro tiempo. S. Quasimodo Novela apasionante atravesada por una metafora prodigiosa: el Informe sobre Ciegos. Witold Gombrowicz Un delirio que habria hecho palidecer de envidia a Lautrea mont. Maurice Nadeau, LA QUINZAINE LITTeRAIRE/ Paris Un poderoso e inolvidable sonador. TIME, Nueva York Drama de la salvacion, escalofriante y demoniaca. O. Macri UNIVERSIDAD DE FLORENCIA Genial, una de las mas asombrosas manifestaciones de nuestro tiempo, uno de los libros del siglo. DIE WELT, Berlin Logro con genio lo que Durrell hizo solo con talento. LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR, Paris si hay una novela que prueba la grandeza de la literatura latinoamericana es Sobre heroes y tumbas. FOLHA DE SAO PAULO, Brasil Hechizante, barroca, monumental, un film de Bunuel sobre un guion de Dostoievski. NEWSWEEK. [via]
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218pages. 17,6x11x1,4cm. Poche. [via]
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This book is a facsimile reprint and may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. [via]
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