Share

Buy New

$13.60

List Price: $23.00
Save: $9.40 (41%)

FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books.

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Want it tomorrow, Oct. 25? Order within and choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details

Ship to:

Select a shipping address:

Buy Used

$10.46

FREE Shipping on orders over $25.

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Clean Earth Books

Fulfilled by Amazon

Turn on 1-Click ordering for this browser

Have one to sell? Sell on Amazon

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See all 3 images

Collected Fictions Paperback – September 1, 1999

by Jorge Luis Borges (Author), Andrew Hurley (Translator)

128 customer reviews

See all 10 formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

"Please retry"

—

Paperback

"Please retry"

$13.60

Audio CD, Unabridged, Audiobook

"Please retry"

—

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume

From Jorge Luis Borges’s 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display his talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language. Together these incomparable works comprise the perfect one-volume compendium for all those who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master's work for those who have yet to discover this singular genius.

Collected Fictions

$13.60 FREE Shipping on orders with at least $25 of books. In Stock. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.

Frequently Bought Together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.

Jorge Luis Borges

26

Paperback
$16.66
Richard Feynman

52

Paperback
$18.95
Jorge Luis Borges

24

Paperback
$19.11
Julian Baggini

40

Paperback
$18.52
Julio Cortazar

36

Paperback
$13.31
Abhijit Banerjee

208

Paperback
$12.77

NO_CONTENT_IN_FEATURE

Product Details

Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Penguin Books (September 1, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0140286802
ISBN-13: 978-0140286809
Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.5 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (128 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,958 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6 in Books > Literature & Fiction > World Literature > Caribbean & Latin American
- #189 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories & Anthologies > Anthologies
- #347 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories & Anthologies > Short Stories

Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?

Customer Reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars

5 star		71%
4 star		13%
3 star		6%
2 star		2%
1 star		8%

Write a customer review

See all 128 customer reviews

Top Customer Reviews

I now describe my pet turtle as monstrous

ByJonathan Tuon February 5, 2007

Format: Paperback

I have always been hesitant to read fiction originally written in any language except English. I'm fickle enough as it is without needing another person's biases and tendencies interfering with my own... and so it was with great trepidation that I bought Hurley's collection.

The stories in summation: marvelous. Hurley's work? I'll never be able to read these Borges stories again without Hurley's translation heavily influencing, and that is an endorsement. I suspect that for most people their first experience of Borges will always be their most memorable, and their preferred. I don't think there are many "On first reading Chapman's Homer" instances: that initial shock of strange and monstrous (perhaps my favorite Borgesian adjective) is evident through any kind of translation so long as it is basically competent. Whatever arguments others may have with Hurley's, they can at least admit that his is that.

But I feel there's more: a playful lilt to the language, one that isn't overly scholarly or mechanical. Hurley's introduction briefly talks about the particular style Borges would become famous for: a laconic, matter-of-fact myth disguised as mere sentences, with the employment of words normally alien to each other. Hurley serves this style well, and his presentation of the most memorable lines of each story were the ones that stayed with me even after readings of several different versions. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I sat down with four different versions of "The Library of Babel" and compared them sentence by sentence. I was living in a bookstore at the time, stuck on an island in the middle of the Aegean and co-habitating with an Englishman who held Irby's version as the superior. I listened politely, and compared, and found that even after ouzo and attempts at persuasion it was my original experience that resonated. Reading Irby's left in me a strange longing for Hurley's words. I remember this line in particular:

"They were urged on by the delirium of trying to reach the books in the Crimson Hexagon: books whose format is smaller than usual, all-powerful, illustrated and magical." (Irby)

"They were spurred on by the holy zeal to reach - someday, through unrelenting effort - the books of the Crimson Hexagon - books smaller than natural books, books omnipotent, illustrated, and magical." (Hurley)

It was that "someday, through unrelenting effort" which stuck with me, and its absence in Irby doomed the entire enterprise. Is this a lack of Irby's, or my own bias towards the translation I first read? I'm not sure, but in almost every way I preferred Hurley.

There seems to be a distinct wave of anti-Hurley sentiment, and it's of the "I read a review that said it, but I'll assume that opinion as my own" variety. I eventually found that the Irby-devoted Englishman hadn't even bothered to read the Hurley version. Don't make his mistake of dismissal-by-proxy: try it for yourself.

55 comments 117 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

A trove of mythological stories defying space and time.

ByDr. Kasumu O. Salawuon September 6, 2000

Format: Paperback

Some earlier reviewers complained about the quality of the translation of this collection of stories by Andrew Hurley, especially when compared to the collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges, (JLB, as he liked to sign), and Norman Thomas di Giovanni in preparing Labyrinths. (I suggest you read all reviews in the order they were written.) As one reasonably familiar with JLB's oeuvre, (a word JLB disliked), I state unequivocally that paying six dollars more for four times the number of stories in Labyrinths is a great bargain. Beyond nickels and dimes, it is precisely because the works of JLB were erstwhile translated into English in bits and pieces that his recognition as a gifted writer took so long in coming. (Jean-Pierre Berne's two-volume French translation, Oeuvres completes, is highly recommended.)
American-born writer, editor, translator and collaborator, di Giovanni, was JLB's personal assistant in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972. I shall now illustrate specifically how his style of translation differed from that of Hurley with the story "The Gospel According to Saint Mark." In characterizing the Gutre family when they first met Espinosa, di Giovanni wrote "They were barely articulate," (in English, that is), while Hurley scribed "They rarely spoke." While the former sentence explains why "the Gutres, who knew so much about things in the country, did not know how to explain them," (page 398 in this book), the latter indicated an aloofness if not suspicion of Espinosa from their first meeting which addresses the irony of the ending. In depicting their eagerness to have St. Mark read to them after dinner, Hurley wrote "In the following days, the Gutres would wolf down the spitted beef and canned sardines in order to arrive sooner at the Gospel" while di Giovanni essayed "The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel." Where di Giovanni deciphered JLB's allusions to Herbert Spencer, W. H. Hudson and Charles I, Hurley explicated the origin of Baltasar Espinosa, the whereabouts of Ramos Mejia and the theme of the novel, Don Segundo Sombra. Take your pick.
Finally, JLB habitually changed texts from edition to edition, especially in his poetry. It is then problematic to determine the faithfulness of the translations. Rest assured that, though rhyme and rhythm are compromised in any translation, in Hurley's rendering, the brilliance and magic of each story is preserved down to, say, the symbolism of the goldfinch at the conclusion of the illustrative yarn, "The Gospel According to Saint Mark."

0Comment 180 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?YesNo

Most Recent Customer Reviews

Book came wrong, but Borges is wonderful

The pages of the book are not evenly cut. I will return the product. Borges deserves better.

Published 1 month ago by Mariannete

Published 1 month ago by Antigone Trivelals

Almost all the stories you would want to read in ...

Almost all the stories you would want to read in one book by the master, one of the earliest practitioners of what we then called postmodernism.

Published 1 month ago by Joyce James

Pretty surreal and a lot of fun to see the development of Borges' style over the years.

Published 2 months ago by Tom_Leventhall

One of my favorite Author's.

Published 3 months ago by Amazon Customer

one of the best novel books

Published 3 months ago by Junlin Xie

Its worth ready for the best.

Not all the stories are remarkable. Its worth ready for the best.

Published 3 months ago by bob phoenix

Contains most of JLB's short stories

Published 3 months ago by Antonio Soto

Weird and entertaining.

Borges was an author I always figured I ought to read but who sounded too hifalutin for me to like it.Read more

Published 4 months ago by One_Music_Man

Bedtime Stories for the Intellectually Insatiable.

None of Borges' stories are casual reading. Have a dictionary handy, and an encyclopedia. Good ones.Read more

Published 4 months ago by Stuart Dummit

Set up an Amazon Giveaway

Collected Fictions

Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway

This item: Collected Fictions

Set up a giveaway

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?

Ficciones Paperback

Jorge Luis Borges

104

$10.91
Labyrinths (New Directions Paperbook) Paperback

Jorge Luis Borges

80

$10.60
The Aleph and Other Stories (Penguin Classics) Paperback

Jorge Luis Borges

24

$11.21
Ficciones (Spanish Edition) Paperback

Jorge Luis Borges

34

$10.07

Conditions of Use
Privacy Notice
Interest-Based Ads
© 1996-2016, Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates