Under his grandmother's tutelage, Borges learned to read English before he could read Spanish. Among the first English-language books he read were works by Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells. In Borges's autobiographical essay, he recalled reading even the great Spanish masterpiece, Cervantes's Don Quixote, in English before reading it in Spanish. Borges's father encouraged writing as well as reading: Borges wrote his first story at age seven and, at nine, saw his own Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince" published in a Buenos Aires newspaper. "From the time I was a boy," Borges noted, "it was tacitly understood that I had to fulfill the literary destiny that circumstances had denied my father. This was something that was taken for granted. . . . I was expected to be a writer." Once his work became known in the United States, Borges inspired many young writers there. "The impact of Borges on the United States writing scene may be almost as great as was his earlier influence on Latin America," commented Bell-Villada. "The Argentine reawakened for us the possibilities of farfetched fancy, of formal exploration, of parody, intellectuality, and wit." Bell-Villada specifically noted echoes of Borges in works by Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and John Gardner. Another American novelist, John Barth, confessed Borges's influence in his own fiction. Bell-Villada concluded that Borges's work paved the way "for numerous literary trends on both American continents, determining the shape of much fiction to come. By rejecting realism and naturalism, he . . . opened up to our Northern writers a virgin field, led them to a wealth of new subjects and procedures." Labyrinths, 1962. This English-language anthology draws from numerous of his Spanish-language works.

The book is dedicated to writer Esther Zemborain de Torres Duggan, a friend and collaborator of Borges's.

Ficciones

El compadrito: su destino, sus barrios, su música 1945, anthology of Argentine writers, including articles and a prologue by Borges himself, and articles by Evaristo Carriego and Adolfo Bioy Casares. Edited with Silvina Bullrich. Manual de zoología fantástica, 1957, short pieces about imaginary beings, written with Margarita Guerrero. Illusion is an important part of Borges's fictional world. In Borges: The Labyrinth Maker, Ana Maria Barrenechea called it "his resplendent world of shadows." But illusion is present in his manner of writing as well as in the fictional world he describes. In World Literature Today, William Riggan quoted Icelandic author Sigurdur Magnusson's thoughts on this aspect of Borges's work. "With the possible exception of Kafka," Magnusson stated, "no other writer that I know manages, with such relentless logic, to turn language upon itself to reverse himself time after time with a sentence or a paragraph, and effortlessly, so it seems, come upon surprising yet inevitable conclusions."

Dema, Verónica (26 de abril de 2010). «Martín Kohan: "La literatura tiene un lugar muy marginal en nuestro país "». La Nación . Consultado el 4 de octubre de 2012. «El caso mayor, sin dudas, es el de Borges: estando vivo, no había una proporción entre la atención que se le podía prestar mediáticamente y la situación concreta de leer Ficciones, El Aleph o incluso sus ensayos.» Fernández Ferrer, Antonio (Agosto de 2009). «Borges y sus "precursores "». Letras Libres . Consultado el 19 de septiembre de 2012. «[...] en la página referida (la número 13) de la revista Sur (agosto de 1939, en el ensayo titulado “La biblioteca total”, que Borges no recopilaría en ninguno de sus libros) señala a Laßwitz como el “primer expositor” del “capricho o imaginación o utopía de la Biblioteca Total” [...]». In "Partial Magic in the Quixote" (also translated as "Partial Enchantments of the Quixote") Borges describes several occasions in world literature when a character reads about himself or sees himself in a play, including episodes from Shakespeare's plays, an epic poem of India, Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, and The One Thousand and One Nights."Why does it disquiet us to know," Borges asked in the essay, "that Don Quixote is a reader of the Quixote, and Hamlet is a spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the answer: those inversions suggest that if the characters in a story can be readers or spectators, then we, their readers, can be fictitious." Nueva refutacion del tiempo (title means "New Refutation of Time"), Oportet & Haereses (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1947.

Open Library

Textos recobrados 1919 - 1929, 1997, previously unpublished early works, both prose (in a variety of genres) and poetry ( ISBN 84-7888-337-1). Se brindan aquí las fechas de la primera aparición de cada uno de los cuentos agrupadas según el medio en el que fueron publicadas y en orden cronológico. A continuación se muestra la composición de cada una de las versiones, tanto de los libros prístinos como de la posterior edición doble, Ficciones. Ficciones, 1944, short stories, an expanded version of El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, 1941. The 1956 edition adds 3 stories. US title Ficciones, 1962 ( ISBN 0-394-17244-2). Also published in the UK as "Fictions" (ed. and trans. Anthony Kerrigan: Calder and Boyars, 1965), and later in a translation by Andrew Hurley ( ISBN 0-14-118384-5). Bloch, William Goldbloom (2008). The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel. Oxford University Press.