Fictions (Penguin Modern Classics)

Why Buy A Fictions (Penguin Modern Classics)?
Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923–doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires–he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the authors short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist–a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.

By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. Its a pleasure to be reminded that Borgess style–poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises–was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it. (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.) The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. The Garden of the Forking Paths remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.

But Hurleys omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in Avelino Arredondo, he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toads time, bordering on eternity, that he sought. Throughout, Hurleys translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for Funes, the Memorious rather than Funes, His Memory.) And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better–and no more pleasurable–rebuttal of the authors description of himself as a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories. –James Marcus

Customer Reviews & Opinions

The path you are to take is endless…
Trying to full describe the writings of Jorge Luis Borges is like trying to explain exactly why Leonardo da Vinci’s art still captivates. The man wrote works of art.

And this classic writer’s brilliant, surreally exquisite works are on best display in “Borges: Collected Fictions,” whose plain name belies the subtle power and exquisite beauty of Jorges’ short stories. His intricate and atmospheric narratives are magical, rich in language, and lets us glimpse the minds of anything and anyone he can conjure up.

Interestingly, the first of these “Fictions” is a series of fictionalized stories about real people — veiled prophets, Chinese pirates, silver-tongued outlaws, Swedenborg, a Japanese courtier and a legendary American outlaw. Only Borges’ vivid writing gives these stories a larger-than-life quality, as if he had spun them out of his imagination.

But the completely fictional stories he created don’t take long to appear. Among them are more gritty narratives — a pair of brothers torn by their mutual love for a woman, a girl coldly calculating her revenge, a labyrinthine story of espionage during World War II, and a woman whose obsession with her dead, dashing husband leads her down into madness.

But these are far outweighed by Borges’ magical realism, which soaks the book from start to finish — encounters with past and future selves, brilliant books and authors that never existed, the mystical Aleph and Zahir which show everything and nothing, a hunt for blue tigers that leads to strangely fascinating stones, an alchemist’s rose, a poet telling a king of pure beauty and wonder, and receiving the hazy memories of Shakespeare.

And then some of his stories cross the border into pure wonder and fantasy. Borges explores the concept of the Eternal Library that catalogues reality, masks, Minotaurs, a man who tries to dream a new being into existence, a search for a city of ancient immortals, and the exploration of ancient heresies, cities, endless books and cults that never existed at all, except in the confines of Borges’ mind.

If this collection has any flaw at all, it’s that Borges isn’t at his best when he tells gritty realistic stories, about knifings, mobs and barroom murders. While these stories are powerful, they feel vaguely restrained, as if he’s holding back his writing skill from its fullest.

The rest of the time, Borges’ writing is exquisitely detailed and atmospheric, and densely packed with philosophical pockets. And these stories are magical realism in the purest sense, with a slight, almost mystical twist to the everyday events that we take for granted. Being mistaken for someone else, being sold a book, and visiting a relative all take on deep significance.

And Borges wraps these stories in lush, digified prose that takes a little while to wade through, but the richness of the words he uses is worth it (”A landscape dazzlingly underlain with gold and silver, a windblown, dizzying landscape of monumental mesas and delicate colouration…”). He’s even able to alter his style drastically — one story has the flavor of an Irish legend, while another is a Lovecraftian sci-fi horror story about aliens in a farmhouse. And his writing takes on many different people’s selves — he even makes readers squirm by taking us into the mind of a loyal Nazi.

It’s almost like another world, Borgeworld, which is almost like ours, but where magical items are hidden in the cellars, houses are built by angels, the Minotaur plays in his maze, and God dreams of mortal lives. The most entrancing foray into Borgeworld is “The Immortal,” about a Roman soldier who goes searching for a city of immortals, and finds an ancient poet who seems very familiar.

“Borges: Collected Fictions” is a very dull name for the collected works of a literary genius, full of shadows, mirrors, masks and the expanses of the human mind. Definitely a must-have.

Amazing deal
Bought this book for myself a while ago at a cheap used bookstore for $50 and loved it so much that I decided to get it for someone as a gift. I couldn’t believe Amazon sold it for less than $15. Amazing deal on a great book - easily the cornerstone of a personal library.

The Greatest Collection
When you read Kafka and you hear the term “Kafkaesque” you understand a little more about the world we live in. From the bureaucratic nonsense of your neighborhood government office to the futility of using reason/logic when dealing with the criminally stubborn and arrogant, the twentieth century Prague author understood what the next hundred years would be like.

Borges is Borges… in some sense he is the literary figure behind magic realism (along with German literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth century). I’ve heard the term “Borgesian” once or twice but it’s not quite as famous. Nonetheless, the two authors have a lot to offer. I prefer Borges. There is something mystical to him, a sage-like presence in his writings. His genius isn’t complicated, it is very honest - he writes stories that feel like essays, narratives that are poignant and celestial, and prose poems that breathe heavy with philosophy and feeling. Reading this collection you’ll encounter: the entire universe in one’s basement, a youth retrieving a souvenir of another life, a man trying to understand the “play of goodbyes”… as well as bandits, ruffians, librarians, Don Quixote, Shakespeare and other vast, quiet dreams, from the double to the figure of the alchemical Golem.

It is a great treat to have all the stories together in one volume (in my hometown I had to do an interlibrary loan through the central library to track down his prose poems - the university at the time didn’t have a copy either). I believe if you read Borges, you’ll not only appreciate his genius, the direction Latin American literature has taken but also the literature of the past. Since my first introduction to his works I have gained a new love of English literature, philosophy and the religions of the far east.

Borges is essential and that too me is “Borgesian”.

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Terror by Night (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)

Product Description
Nothing is so improbable as what is true Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later. Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st June 1842, in Horse Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, USA. He was the tenth of thirteen children, ten of whom survived infancy. His father, an unsuccessful farmer with an unseemly love of literature, had given all the Bierce children names beginning with A. There was Abigail, the eldest; then Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius etc. So oddness was a part of Bierces life from the beginning. Poverty and religion of the extreme variety were the two chief influences on young Ambroses childhood. He not only hated this period of his life, he also developed a deep hatred for his family and this is reflected in some of his stories which depict families preying on and murdering one another. For example the unforgettable opening sentence of An Imperfect Conflagration seems to sum up his bitter attitude: Early in 1872 I murdered my father - an act that made a deep impression on me at the time.

Why Buy A Terror by Night (Wordsworth Mystery & Supernatural) (Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural)?
Nothing is so improbable as what is true Of all the writers of ghost and horror stories, Ambrose Bierce is perhaps the most colourful. He was a dark, cynical and pessimistic soul who had a grim vision of fate and the unfairness of life, which he channelled into his fiction. And in his death, or rather his disappearance, he created a mystery as strange and unresolved as any that he penned himself. But more of that later. Ambrose Gwinett Bierce was born in a log cabin on 21st June 1842, in Horse Creek, Meigs County, Ohio, USA. He was the tenth of thirteen children, ten of whom survived infancy. His father, an unsuccessful farmer with an unseemly love of literature, had given all the Bierce children names beginning with A. There was Abigail, the eldest; then Amelia, Ann, Addison, Aurelius etc. So oddness was a part of Bierces life from the beginning. Poverty and religion of the extreme variety were the two chief influences on young Ambroses childhood. He not only hated this period of his life, he also developed a deep hatred for his family and this is reflected in some of his stories which depict families preying on and murdering one another. For example the unforgettable opening sentence of An Imperfect Conflagration seems to sum up his bitter attitude: Early in 1872 I murdered my father - an act that made a deep impression on me at the time.

Customer Reviews & Opinions

51 Brilliantly Cynical and Gruesome Tales
Wordsworth Editions, published in London, has a wonderful thing going with its current series entitled “Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural,” bringing back into print short-story collections and full-length novels from such relatively unknown authors as Gertrude Atherton, Edith Nesbit, D.K. Broster, Marjorie Bowen, May Sinclair and Dennis Wheatley. The imprint’s collection of horror tales from Ohio-born Ambrose Bierce is a very satisfying and generous one, gathering 51 of the author’s more shuddery pieces, out of the 90 or so from his complete oeuvre. (Bierce never wrote any longer pieces, calling the novel, in typically cynical fashion, “a short story padded.”) Bierce, who was born in 1842 and died mysteriously, most likely in Mexico, around 1914, wrote tales that have been elsewhere divided into three categories: Tales of Horror, Tall Tales and Tales of the Civil War, in which he fought with distinction on the Union side. But these three loose categories don’t tell the full story; his most famous short piece, for example, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” while certainly being a tale of war, is also undeniably a psychological horror story. Indeed, a reader of this volume will quickly discern at least eight types of Bierce tales therein; more on that in a moment. All the stories in this collection display an extremely fine polish as regards writing technique (some of the tales may even be accused of being overwritten) and a cynical, often merciless worldview. The author was not nicknamed “Bitter Bierce” for nothing, and there is absolutely no way for the reader to predict whether or not any character, be it man, woman or child, will suffer a horrible fate. As no less a critic than H.P. Lovecraft wrote of Bierce’s writing, in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature”: “[There is in it] a rare strain of sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty and tantalising disappointment.” And as David Stuart Davies mentions, in his well-written and informative intro to this edition, “His stories invariably turn on these strange and often heart-stopping twists of fate–twists that are calculated to shock and shake the reader out of a comfortable complacency….”

As to those eight types of tales found in this volume, by far the most commonly encountered is the Ghost Tale, such as “A Baby Tramp,” in which a mother’s ghost lures its baby son on a cross-country pilgrimage; “The Moonlit Road,” a murderous tale told from three vantages, including the dead wife; “The Middle Toe of the Right Foot,” in which another murdered wife (little love is lost in these grisly Bierce stories!) takes a hideous vengeance; and “Staley Fleming’s Hallucination,” which features what may be literature’s earliest canine ghost. Then there are the purely Supernatural Tales, such as “The Spook House,” with its unescapable room filled with corpses; “A Wireless Message,” in which a man sees his wife’s flaming doom from 1,000 miles away; and “John Bartine’s Watch,” with its accursed timepiece. Of course, there are the Civil War Tales, and if “Occurrence” is the best-known of the six presented here, it is not alone in quality. “One of the Missing” tells of the terrible plight of a Union soldier who is trapped beneath the wreckage of a bombarded building; “Chickamauga” describes the outcome of that horrible battle through the eyes of a 6-year-old boy; and “Three and One Are One,” “The Affair at Coulter’s Notch” and “The Mocking-Bird” all tell ironic tales of how the war divided families and turned son against father, husband against wife, and brother against brother. And speaking of horrible, what I refer to as Bierce’s purely Horrible Doings is the fourth category here; tales that tell of characters visited by truly horrendous fates. “The Man Out of the Nose” tells of the tragic end that a married man’s love affair brings about; “The Applicant” tells the sorry story of a poor old man on Christmas Eve; “A Holy Terror” gives us a gold prospector violating the grounds in a deserted cemetery; and “The Eyes of the Panther” tells of how a tragedy involving a wildcat has a far-reaching psychological impact on a woman later on. Then there are what I suppose one might call Strange Doings; tales, many of them short shorts, that make you scratch your head and go “Wha?” In “The Difficulty of Crossing a Field,” “An Unfinished Race” and “Charles Ashmore’s Trail,” men mysteriously vanish without a trace; in “John Mortonson’s Funeral,” a hungry feline interrupts a man’s mourning family; and in “An Adventure at Brownville,” an opera singer seemingly has a murderous effect on women. Bierce also wrote what may be regarded as two Science Fiction Tales, and they are both doozies: “Moxon’s Master,” featuring a nasty-tempered, chess-playing automaton, and “The Damned Thing,” with its invisible, field-dwelling creatures. The seventh category here is Tales of Murder, of which “An Imperfect Conflagration” is a perfect example; here, a man casually murders both his parents to possess himself of a music box. (Well, at least he had a good reason!) Finally, there are the Unclassifiable Tales; stories that are difficult to synopsize, much less describe. In “Haita the Shepherd,” a lad learns a hard lesson about the essence of happiness; in “The Night Doings at ‘Deadman’s’,” a man sits in a shanty waiting for the ghost of a “Chinaman” whose braid he cut off; in “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” a man walks through a forest that is dripping with blood to meet the spirit of his dead mother….

As you can see, a wide assortment of story types, plots and settings. Most of the stories here are concise to the point of terseness; only two stories are longer than 10 pages, and many barely fill two. Elegantly written by a master wordsmith, and filled with concisely etched characters and backdrops, there is certainly not much in the way of padding. Brilliantly cynical, as would be expected from the man who gave the world “The Devil’s Dictionary,” the tales presented here often provoke a guffaw in the middle of a shudder. Bottom line: All readers who have not yet had the pleasure of encountering this true master of the art should certainly pounce!

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Treatise on Vampires & Revenants : The Phantom World

Customer Reviews & Opinions

A nice non-dead’s book
The first book published about the non-dead people. I love vampires, and Dom Agustin Calmet wrote this book to keep this idea out of our minds. He did just the opposite.

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The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories (Dover Mystery, Detective, & Other Fiction)

Why Buy A The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories (Dover Mystery, Detective, & Other Fiction)?
A treasured source for Lovecraft, Howard, and others, this collection endures as a work of remarkable power. Includes all the stories from The King in Yellow — Yellow Sign, Repairer of Reputations, Demoiselle dYs, and others — plus stories from other sources, including three early sci-fi fantasies from In Search of the Unknown. 12 total.

Customer Reviews & Opinions

Presenting some of Chambers’ best from a range of sources
Robert Chamber’s title story became one of the most important works in American supernatural fiction since those of Poe, representing one of the first attempts to establish the horror of the names: this reprints all the supernatural stories from THE KING IN YELLOW, presenting some of Chambers’ best from a range of sources. A highly recommended pick for fans of horror and the supernatural.

Chambers Chills
Robert W. Chambers is an almost forgotten writer of fantasy and horror who should be honored for his originality and insights into human nature. To read the King In Yellow is to give Robert W. Chambers a chance to show how a well written psychological story can unfold. His stories build slowly and soon pull the reader into a world only Chambers could envision. To reveal any of his story plots here would do him an injustice.

The sad part of today’s readership is that many no longer have the patience to move slowly and deeply through a story to it’s climax. Everything must be swift and obvious these days. If you read Robert W. Chambers prepare for a time in another world that slowly sucks you into the unknown and often the terrifying. Grab an armchair, turn off the tv and the radio and quietly allow yourself to be absorbed by Chambers masterful writing. You will be delighted.

Classic Short Horror Fiction
An excellent collection by a lesser-known writer of short
horror fiction, this volume contains one of my all-time favorite short stories in any genre, “The Harbor-Master.”
Buy and read this book!

A Must-Have for Lovecraft fans
HP Lovecraft was heavily inspired by Chambers’ wierd tales from _The King in Yellow_. (He stole the name and vague concept of Hastur from it.) The frustrating thing about RW Chambers is that he COULD write very well, but for some reason he usually didn’t. At his best he could weave an atmosphere of terrifying hallucinatory brilliance. At his worst he was hokey, sentimental, sappy, and tiresome. Half of his original _The King in Yellow_ consists of dopey romance stories that will infuriate the wierd fiction fan. Not so here. This Dover collection has only the best tales from _The King in Yellow_, as well as a number of other chilling morsels picked from Chambers’ large body of later (mostly forgettable) work.

You should get hold of this collection just for “The Repairer of Reputations,” which ranks as a superior masterpiece of surreal paranoid delirium. It’s one of the top 5 wierd stories of all time, and actually BETTER than anything by Lovecraft.

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Nineteen Eighty-four (Penguin Modern Classics)

Why Buy A Nineteen Eighty-four (Penguin Modern Classics)?
Hidden away in the Record Department of the sprawling Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith skilfully rewrites the past to suit the needs of the Party. Yet he inwardly rebels against the totalitarian world he lives in, which demands absolute obedience and controls him through the all-seeing telescreens and the watchful eye of Big Brother, symbolic head of the Party. In his longing for truth and liberty, Smith begins a secret love affair with a fellow-worker Julia, but soon discovers the true price of freedom is betrayal.

Customer Reviews & Opinions

Deviates corrected for their own good
In a society that has eliminated many imbalances, surplus goods, and even class struggle, there are bound to be deviates; Winston Smith is one of those. He starts out, due to his inability to doublethink, with thought crime. This is in a society that believes a thought is as real as the deed. Eventually he graduates through a series of misdemeanors to illicit sex and even plans to overthrow the very government that took him in as an orphan.

If he is caught, he will be sent to the “Ministry of Love” where they have a record of 100% cures for this sort of insanity. They will even forgive his past indiscretions.

Be sure to watch the three different movies made from this book:

1984 (1954) Peter Cushing is Winston Smith

1984 (1956) Edmond O’Brien is Winston Smith

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984) John Hurt is Winston smith

1984

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