This volume brings together a collection of essays on Borges by leading scholar Jaime Alazraki. Together the essays constitute an introduction to important aspects of Borges' oeuvre, including the influence of the Kabbalah, structure and style in the fiction, Borges' poetry, and Borges' impact on Latin American literature.

Focuses on a range of Jewish and non-Jewish writers to examine the intersection of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and secular Jewish literatures. Kabbalah and Literature shows how the Jewish mystical tradition contributes to the renewal of literature in a modern, global, and increasingly disconnected age. Kitty Millet explores Kabbalah's conceptual underpinnings, aesthetic principles, tenets, and signifiers to demonstrate how literature's absorption of kabbalistic material has altered its ontology, function, and the tasks it sets for itself. Reading writers from Europe and the Americas, Kitty Millet maps how the kabbalist's desire to "recover Eden" transforms into a latent messianic drive only intuitable through text. Thus it charts a journey of sorts, a migration of Jewish mystical material embedded surreptitiously within text in order to shift ever so slightly at times the range of the literary to encompass an aesthetic vision not easily reducible to the literal, the known, the allegorical, or even the philosophical. In this way, Kabbalah and Literature proposes a novel, intuitive approach, shifting focus away from the Jewish text's epistemological elements to embrace its "secrets."

Esplin argues that Borges, through a sustained and complex literary relationship with Poe's works, served as the primary catalyst that changed Poe's image throughout Spanish America from a poet-prophet to a timeless fiction writer.

Place and Displacement in the Narrative Worlds of Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar engages the notions of place and displacement as heuristic devices for literary analysis of Borges's and Cortázar's narratives. It maps out these authors' visions of place and displacement in some of their most famous texts; locates the 'place' of Borges's texts within Cortázar's fictional universe; and delineates new routes in communication between different literary traditions, and philosophical and anthropological discourses. This book also suggests that the challenge of a strict opposition between place and displacement in Borges's and Cortázar's works is both representative and emblematic of a continuum of Latin American literature.

A Readers Guide to ten of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges' best-known and most widely studied short stories.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctorate--University College, London, 2001).

A collection of interviews now available from New Directions for the first time The words of a genius: Borges at Eighty transcends our expectations of ordinary conversation. In these interviews with Barnstone, Dick Cavett, and Alastair Reid, Borges touches on favorite writers (Whitman, Poe, Emerson) and familiar themes — labyrinths, mystic experiences, and death — and always with great, throw-away humor. For example, discussing nightmares, he concludes,“When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself.”

Offers a penetrating cross-cultural analysis of the enduring genre of parables, revealing a dramatic social, cultural, and political shift in the way we view the divine.

This book delves into creative renditions of key aspects of Jewish Mysticism in Latin American literature, film, and art from the perspective of literary and cultural studies. It introduces the work of Latin American authors and artists who have been inspired by Jewish Mysticism from the 1960s to the present focusing on representations of dybbuks (transmigratory souls), the presence of Eros as part of the experience of mystical prayer, reformulations of Zoharic fables, and the search for Tikkun Olam (cosmic repair), among other key topics of Jewish Mysticism. The purpose of this book is to open up these aspects of their work to a broad audience who may or may not be familiar with Jewish Mysticism.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was one of the great writers of the twentieth century and the most influential author in the Spanish language of modern times. He had a seminal influence on Latin American literature and a lasting impact on literary fiction in many other languages. However, Borges has been accessible in English only through a number of anthologies drawn mainly from his work of the 1940s and 1950s. The primary aim of this Companion is to provide a more comprehensive account of Borges's oeuvre and the evolution of his writing. It offers critical assessments by leading scholars of the poetry of his youth and the later poetry and fiction, as well as of the 'canonical' volumes of the middle years. Other chapters focus on key themes and interests, and on his influence in literary theory and translation studies.