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Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was born on August 24, 1899, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Fascinated at once by the simplicity of language and the complexity of the human psyche, Borges used the short story form to craft distorted, dreamlike representations of reality. He served as professor of English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires and director of Argentina’s National Library, and his fiction displays a corresponding reverence for arcane history and scholarship. Borges’s oeuvre includes volumes of fiction including Ficciones (1944) and Labyrinths (1962), as well as works of nonfiction and harder-to-classify books, such as The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957). Although Borges was born and spent most of his adult life in Buenos Aires, he was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, to which he returned three months before his death at age eighty-six in 1986.

 

Photo © Willis Barnstone, courtesy of New Directions

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