Critical Essays On Jorge Luis Borges

A collection of critical essay about Jorge Luis Borges and his work.

In 1971 Borges was invited to talk about his writing to students enrolled in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. This book is based on tape-recorded transcripts of these informal discussions between Borges, translator Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Frank MacShane, head of the creative writing department at Columbia, and the students. The three seminars deal with prose, poetry, and translation. In each Borges, in discussing his methods, refers to specific examples in his writing -- the use of local color and irony in his prose, autobiographical details in his poetry, testing and experiment in translation. The result is a rare and fruitful glimpse at how today's supreme verbal craftsman solves the age-old problems of the writer. -- From publisher's description.

Provides biographical information along with plot summaries, lists of characters, and critical views of the author's most famous short stories.

This book includes 118 earlier pieces never before translated, and moves through his more fantastic work to a later realism

Gore Vidal, known for such best-sellers as The City and the Pillar, Burr, Lincoln, and Myra Breckinridge, is a household name. The controversial Vidal ran for Congress in 1960, and set sparks flying with his public debates challenging William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer. Although one of America's most admired and prolific writers, Vidal has been steadfastly ignored or impugned by many critics. This is partly owing to the vast scope of his writings, which include more than twenty novels, half a dozen plays, dozens of screenplays, countless essays and book reviews, political commentary, and short stories; how do the critics approach such a writer? There has also been backlash against Vidal, whose radical polemics and undisguised contempt for those whom he has called "the hacks and hicks of academe" have hardly endeared him to the critical establishment. Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain is the first collection of critical essays to approach this important American writer in an attempt to rectify the unwarranted underestimation of his work. Jay Parini has drawn from the best of previously published criticism and commissioned fresh articles by leading contemporary critics to construct a comprehensive portrait of Vidal's multifaceted and memorable career. Writers as diverse as Harold Bloom, Stephen Spender, Catharine R. Stimpson, Richard Poirier, and Italo Calvino examine Vidal's work in their own highly individual ways, and each finds a different Vidal to celebrate, chide, recollect, or view close up. Also included is a recent interview with Parini in which Vidal discusses his career and his troubled relationship with the reviewers.The Vidal that finally emerges from these essays is a writer of undeniable weight and importance. As readers will agree, Gore Vidal: Writer Against the Grain establishes his rightful role as one of the premier novelists and leading critical observers of this century.

"The face of Borges most widely known is that of the blind, patrician man of letters in whose writings emotion is subjected to the play of ideas. Yet Borges, born in Buenos Aires in 1899, did not become virtually blind until the 1950s, and in the decades before this affliction and before his books were widely translated and internationally celebrated, he wrote, loved and engage in local polemics with adventurous passion." "In Jorge Luis Borges, Jason Wilson explores Borges' tumultuous early life in the streets and cafes of Buenos Aires and charts his literary friendships, love affairs and travels. Borges claimed never to have invented a character: 'It's always me, subtly disguised.' Illuminating the connections running between the biography and the fictions, Wilson reminds us that Borges was always a poet whose life was recreated in his work - but never in confessional ways - and restores his Argentine roots. This book will be an invaluable resource for all who treasure the modern master."--BOOK JACKET.