On writing
By: Jorge Luis Borges ; edited with an introduction and notes by Suzanne Jill Levine.
Contributors: Levine, Suzanne Jill.
Series: Penguin classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2010
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 192
ISBN-13: 9780143105725
Subjects: Borges, Jorge Luis, -- 1899-1986 -- Translations into English; Borges, Jorge Luis, -- 1899-1986 -- Knowledge -- Literature
Genres: Translations into English
Work titles: Essays.
Description: Borges' On Writing is designed to offer a comprehensive and balanced account of the evolution of Borges' thinking on the craft of writing, an intense and perennial concern of his. Borges had a remarkable impact on writers in the USA, Britain, Italy, France and many other countries. His essays were perceived to have anticipated some of the principal topics of modern literary theory, from Russian formalism through to poststructuralism and postmodernism.
Notes: Includes selections from Selected non-fictions (Penguin, 1999), plus ten new translations.

Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: Becoming a man of letters; ultra manifesto; on expressionism; after images; Joyce's Ulysses; the ballad of reading Gaol; title: Word music; verbiage for poems; an investigation of the word; the art of verbal abuse; on literary description; on metaphor; Walt Whitman, Leaves of grass (prologue); title: On translation; two ways to translate; the Homeric versions; title: Reading as writing; a profession of literary faith; literary pleasure; the superstitious ethics of the reader; the paradox of apollinaire; Kafka and his precursors; Flaubert and his exemplary destiny; title: The critic at work; Virginia Woolf (capsule biography); T. S. Eliot (capsule biography); Paul Valery (capsule biography); William Faulkner, Absalom! absalom!; Herman Mellville, Bartleby the scrivener; Henry James, The abasement of the Northmores; Marcel Schwob, imaginary lives; H. G. Wells, The time machine; The invisible man (prologue); Julio Cortazar, stories (prologue); title: The perfect plot; the labyrinths of the detective story and Chesterton Ellery Queen, The halfway house; Adolfo Bioy Casares, The invention of morel (prologue); title: Wilkie Collins, The moonstone; the detective story; title: Narrative art; stories from Turkestan; the cinematograph, the biograph; narrative art and magic; preface to a universal history of infamy; when fiction lives in fiction.