From Booklist
The late Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer was a seminal figure in Latin American literature, but his influence spread well beyond the western hemisphere. Genius stood behind Borges' talent, as evidenced in every interview collected here. His absolute devotion to books and writing comes to the fore on every page, as does his devotion to Argentina and being Argentine. Discussion of the effects of his blindness on his lifestyle cannot be, and is not, avoided; and, of course, Borges could not be above politics, at least in his thinking, in a country where whoever is in charge has much to do with one's daily life. Any one interviewer can only hope to break the surface of Borges' labyrinthine mind, but in a series of interviews, with, as it happens here, so little duplication of questioning, much more depth and dimension can be illuminated. Brad Hooper


Card catalog description
Jorge Luis Borges, one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed he deserved, this story writer, poet, essayist, and man of letters died at age eighty-six. This anthology of interviews with him features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work. He discusses his blindness, his family and childhood, early travels, literary friends, and struggles to find his literary identity. In depth he examines the meanings and intentions of his own famous stories and poems, and he speaks of the writers whose works he has loved - Dante, Cervantes, Emerson, Dickinson, H. G. Wells, Kafka, Stevenson, Kipling, Whitman, Frost, and Faulkner - and of those whom he disliked, such as Hemingway and Lorca. Borges expresses his contempt for Peron and assesses the tumultuous politics of Argentina. He speaks also of the imagination as a type of dreaming, about issues of collaboration and translation, about philosophy, and about time.

FROM THE PUBLISHER