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Jorge Luis Borges — Collected Fictions & Collected Non-Fictions
With Borges we are often transported from the flatland of narrative to a direct experience of the sphere-land of Visionary Geography. The only way to pull that off is to create an all-encompassing Art, which is what Borges has done with his slick & quick short-story/essay format. Funny how the tried and true old-fashioned ways (historical and fictional storytelling) persist when it comes to approaching the Infinite. One need only glance at the Zohar for lucid confirmation of this point. We recommend you don't do that actually, but it's comforting that the scattered modern mind responds well to this same technique. Borges' seemingly fractured, Microcosmic approach to the Macrocosm is well appropriate, and totally unparalleled in it's overarching success — especially when it comes to unpacking the larger-than-rational for today's ADD-afflicted readers.
Seeing that J.L.B. provides us with the closest thing we moderns have to a concrete written testimony of what we all supposedly mean when we say "the 4th dimension" (to use current lingo), it's understandable that certain science brains and literary freaks who love Blake and Joyce celebrate Borges with the same passion that some of the more clued-in Historians do. Too many of the rest of us lag behind this train. Why? Oh the usual: he's impossible to classify, hard to describe without sounding like an idiot, and coveted by various elites who seem like complete jerks... you know the story. Plus, "essays and short stories" probably doesn't sound serious or exciting enough for post-jock pseudo-intellectuals, much less all those smarmy "edgy" academics in leather jackets with their noses way up Zizek. Doubly cursed in these times, Borges didn't include enough cool looking diagrams or pretensions to "hidden knowledge" to cause certain other folks *ahem* to take notice. All we're saying, whoever you are, is put one of these Borges' collections on the back of your toilet and you'll be fucked for life.
Here are all his "fictions" and "non-fictions" collected in separate volumes, for your eternal astonishment and bewilderment. Let us pre-empt the emails we will receive promoting the merits of earlier, single editions of what is collected here with a grouchy, impatient "yeah... yeah..." . Our copies of those are dog-eared and well loved too. But give the young'uns a break, huh? Oh, and we've been saving Borges' poetry for the end of life, so having averted our eyes from it, we can't truthfully recommend it... we're saving that for Judgement Day.