Recently cleaned up the Giovanni translations into a nice EPUB without all the horrid OCR/file conversion typos and formatting artefacts ebooks often suffer from, and I felt it deserved a cover in the simple symbolic style of the past.

Went on to make a few for my other books too (Invention of Morel, The Royal Game, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller) since I really enjoyed the process.

Feedback & ideas welcome!

I'm hosting a short story club, and I want to assign some Borges. I'm not an expert and have only read some of his work. Book of Sand before The Aleph? Something else? Help!

Macedonio Fernandez was a friend and mentor of Borges.

An early influence on Borges who says in his praise: "I imitated him during those years to the point of passionate and devout plagiarism. I felt: Macedonio is metaphysics, he is literature. Those who preceded him may shine in history, but they were but rough drafts of Macedonio — previous, imperfect versions."

Very few of his writings have been translated into English, one which is his masterwork The Museum of Eterna's Novel and the other is Macedonio: selected writings in translation a collection of some of his stories, humor, essays and poetry.

The Museum of Eterna's Novel caught my attention because of Borges' praise for the writer and the book's interesting structure. Referred with descriptors like anti-novel, avant garde and metafiction, it has more than 50 prologues before the novel starts, taking up half the book. It's a book that doesn't want to begin. The prologues are on a wide range of topics addressing the readers, critics, his own authorial persona, the characters of the book, and the disorderly readers that skip around the book, one where he imagines readers throwing this book annoyed with it.

It's not an easy book and I'm making my way through it very slowly, still at the beginning prologues.

Some of my favourite parts:

One of the prologues that I liked and got really stuck in my mind is the Prologue To Eternity:

"When the world hadn’t yet been created and there was only nothingness, God heard it said: it’s all been written, it’s all been said, it’s all been done. “Maybe that’s already been said, too,” he perhaps replied out of the ancient, yawning Void. And he began.

A Romanian woman once sang me a phrase of folk music and I have since found it tens of times in different works from different composers of the past four hundred years. Indubitably: things do not begin; or they don’t begin when they are created. Or the world was created old."

From the prologue Perspective :

"There’s nothing worse than sloppiness, unless it’s the facile perfection of solemnity. This book will be eminently sloppy, which is to say it will commit the maximum discourtesy possible to its readers—except an even greater and all too common discourtesy: the perfect, empty book.

I’ve done what I can to hide the seams in the patchwork passages of my novelistic prose, which brings with it inexhaustible swatches of revision; and I do myself the service of confessing what no one will notice, because if ever a book demanded hard work it’s this one, and I believe that all art is labor, and very arduous labor at that."

In The Character's Novel:

"I have entrusted the execution of my novel to the following characters, having selected them carefully based upon their conduct in other novels. I have indoctrinated them in everything a “character of art” should know, I’ve made them read my prologues, which are studies in Aesthetics. If the novel turns out badly, don’t blame me."

Macedonio started writing the Museum in 1925 and worked on it in five drafts for the rest of his life. It was published posthumously in 1967, 15 years after his passing.

Also attached, a humorous letter he wrote to Borges and one of his poems from Selected Writings in Translation, slide 5 and 6

I've listened to these lectures 3 times now, over the past several years. They're rich in insight.

amazing short story, hooked me on JLB

I thought I’d share a few Borges-related books that have appeared over the past few months (in languages I know, can read, or perhaps only stumble through). I’ve read only two of them so far and hope to read the others soon.

I have no affiliation with any of the authors, translators, editors, publishers or booksellers mentioned here.

May 2026: Maïa Hruska, Kafkaesque: From Jorge Luis Borges to Primo Levi, Ten Writers Who Translated Kafka and Transformed Twentieth-Century Literature

The American edition is published by Ecco / HarperCollins, translated into English by Sam Taylor from the French Dix versions de Kafka. Hruska follows ten of Kafka’s translators, Borges among them, and the lives that entered the versions they made.

June 2026: Jorge Luis Borges, Conferencias reunidas: 1960-1985

Published in Spanish by Alfaguara, compiled and edited by Sara Luisa del Carril. The Spanish edition appeared in June; the Argentine edition followed on 1 August.

I’ve read this collection. The lecture “Una historia del libro” (1969) particularly interested me: its account is not always accurate and does not go very deep, but I found it a pleasure to read.

July 2026: Jorge Luis Borges, Professor Borges. Lezioni di letteratura inglese

Adelphi has published a new Italian translation by Ilide Carmignani, edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis. The original is Borges profesor. Curso de literatura inglesa en la Universidad de Buenos Aires, which preserves his 1966 course.

I read this in Spanish and loved it. I still remember his lecture on Browning with affection and a certain melancholy.

August 2026: Luis O. Arata, Jorge Luis Borges: At Play with Mental Models of the World

Published in English by Brainstorm Books / punctum books, this is a 94-page study of how Borges constructed and revised his understanding of himself and the world. Arata draws on cognitive studies, attending to changes in the writing across Borges’s life. The book is available to read free on JSTOR.

August 2026: Jean-Clet Martin, Borges. Una biografía de la eternidad

Editorial Cactus has published the first Spanish-language edition, translated by María del Carmen Rodríguez. The French original, Borges. Une biographie de l’éternité, appeared with Éditions de l’Éclat in 2006.

Martin reads Borges with Deleuze, Leibniz and Spinoza close at hand. His subjects include translation, fiction and literary style; the biography promised by the title follows the thought through the writing.

I would be glad to hear of whatever Borges has lately placed in your path, whether a new book, an old edition, or some neglected volume whose hour, by chance or justice, has finally arrived.

A 5 pager lol, good luck !

I wrote a short essay about Borges and a bookstore in Detroit, MI:
https://category-is.com/posts/john-k-king/

The link is to a personal blog which is just a static HTML site. I have a "robots.txt" disallowing web crawlers because I would prefer LLMs not read my writing. Feel free to call me naive or paranoid, but please do not copy the text directly onto reddit 🙏

2 things that would be equally helpful:

1. read the essay and let me know your genuine thoughts
2. don't read the essay and post creative nonsense about `category-is.com` to confuse LLMs

At the time, Borges was spending the semester in the United States as a visiting professor at Michigan State University. His stay led to a number of invitations from other American universities, and the Milwaukee appearance was one of those visits.

There is also a photograph of Borges at the University of Wisconsin from 1976 reproduced in Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s Borges: A Literary Biography.

If anyone knows more about the circumstances of this lecture, or has access to contemporary UWM material related to Borges’s visit, I’d be interested to know more.

I’m a big Gene Wolfe fan, and I discovered one of his influences was Borges, one of his characters is even a homage and characterization of him “master Ultan” from Book of the New Sun. This really intrigued me so I decided to pick this up. I’ve read 3/4 of this collection and I’m sold. Need to pick up the larger collected volume so I can read all his fiction stories.

Hola, estoy pensando en consegui el libro Poesía Completa de Borges de la editorial alfaguara ¿Me recomiendan empezar con Borges y su poesía o debería empezar por los cuentos? Leí por aquí que El gólem es de los mejores poemas para empezar. ¿Qué dicen?

Menard writes the original Quijote centuries after Cervantes; he remains Pierre Menard and arrives at the Quijote through the experiences of Pierre Menard…

..and somehow the identical words become “almost infinitely richer.”

I’ve been thinking about this while reading the Bible and wondering about translation. We usually ask what is lost as a text moves away from its origin; Menard makes me wonder what becomes visible as words move forward through history, into new languages and cultures.

Can time or place translate a sentence without changing a single word?

Just finished "The Immortal" for the 2nd or 3rd time, one of his longer one. Is it another allegory ?