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Useful sites and work online
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| JORGE LUIS BORGES (1899-1986) |
"I am not sure that I exist, actually.
I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met,
all the women that I have loved; all the cities that I have visited,
all my ancestors." | | Birthplace
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Education
Taught at home, by his parents; attended school in Geneva.
Other jobs
Librarian (fittingly enough), academic
Did you know?
He honed his literary skills writing yoghurt adverts.
Critical verdict
Borges became a myth in his own lifetime for his mythic riddlings,
but never, to the fury of his followers, received the ultimate prize -
"Not granting me the Nobel Prize has become a Scandinavian tradition;
since I was born they have not been granting it to me."
Recommended works
Labyrinths, a collection of some of his most dazzling stories, is an excellent starting point; a new Collected Works appeared in 1999.
Influences
His great loves included Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarm�Schopenhauer and Walt Whitman.
Now read on
Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Umberto Eco, Salman Rushdie
Adaptations
Several
of his short stories have been filmed; the most recent, and
well-received, is Death and the Compass (1996), dir. Alex (Repo Man)
Cox.
Recommended biography
James Woodall's Borges: A Life is a well-researched guide to the man and his work, and provides political background.
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