Here are 76 books that Jorge Luis Borges fans have personally recommended if you like
Jorge Luis Borges.
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Iâm a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my universityâs student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetryâand having the pleasure of teaching it to studentsâhas been my best way of checking in with myself to see whatâs most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. Itâs also my best way of going beyond myselfâallowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
I love Wordsworthâs poetry (and his comments on the creative process) for its beauty and its importance to the history of the art form. His best poemsâespecially Tintern Abbey and his Intimations or Immortality Odeâtell psychological and spiritual tales about the gains and losses of growing up, and the role that nature can play in a personâs maturation.Â
His Preface to Lyrical Ballads lays out a Romantic program for poetry that has been hugely influential for two centuries. Wordsworthâs idea that poetry comes from âemotion recollected in tranquilityâ and captures the âspontaneous overflow of powerful feelingsâ encapsulates how, for me and countless other writers, reflecting on personal memories provides a storehouse of poetic material.
William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan and neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men and women, of ordinary thoughts, sights and sounds, and his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art.
Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary, by whomâŠ
What happens when youâre face-to-face with a truth that shakes you? Do you accept it, or pretend it was never there?
Award-winning author Mark A. Rayner smudges the lines between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative in this collection of stories that examines this questionâwhat Homer called passing through TheâŠ
Iâm a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my universityâs student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetryâand having the pleasure of teaching it to studentsâhas been my best way of checking in with myself to see whatâs most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. Itâs also my best way of going beyond myselfâallowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
I also love Eliotâs poetry (and his comments on the creative process) because of how different they are from Wordsworthâsâand equally profound. In essays including Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that keeping your poetry âpersonalâ artificially limits your material. And I think heâs right: some of my own best poems come from imagining my way into someone elseâs mind.
Eliotâs own poetry, including The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, illustrates the value of this approach in how it crafts its titular character. Eliot can also write deeply intellectual poems like The Waste Land that transcend purely âpersonalâ concerns by exploring history and that repay many re-readings. In addition to their thematic richness, Wordsworthâs and Eliotâs poems are also beautifully musical.
An indispensable collection of the Nobel Prize winner's most renowned works
âIn ten yearsâ time,â wrote Edmund Wilson in Axelâs Castle, âEliot has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing in English.â In 1948, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize âfor his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry.â
This book is made up of six individual titles: Four Quartets, Collected Poems: 1909â1935, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, Old Possumâs Book of Practical Cats, and The Cocktail Party. It offers not only enjoyment of one of the great talentsâŠ
Iâm a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my universityâs student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetryâand having the pleasure of teaching it to studentsâhas been my best way of checking in with myself to see whatâs most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. Itâs also my best way of going beyond myselfâallowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
Every time I revisit Gabriela Mistralâs poetry, Iâm eager to start writing new poems of my own. She unlocks my imagination with her richly synesthetic images, her suggestive metaphors, and her intense emotions, including grief, doubt, joy, and gratitude.
Her first two booksâDesolation (DesolaciĂłn, 1922) and Tenderness (Ternura, 1924)âare my favorites. From the landscape of her native Chile and her personal experiences, she develops universal themes. Her voice is always humane, no matter what emotional region she journeys into.
Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and her works are among the finest in all contemporary poetry. She is loved and honored throughout the world as one of the great humanistic voices of our time.
This bilingual edition of selected poems was translated and edited by Doris Dana, a close personal friend with whom Gabriela lived and worked with prior to her death in 1957. These translations give a profound insight into the original poetry of this greatest of contemporary Latin American women. They were selected from her four major worksâŠ
In this collection of nine stories, J.C. Gemmell takes readers on a quest into the future.
Tion is a dystopian civilisation built on the wreckage of a drowned Earth. Here, technology saves and oppresses, and mankind clings to survival in a place where the privileged live above the clouds, andâŠ
Iâm a poet, lover of great literature, and an English professor who has served as faculty advisor to my universityâs student-run literary journal. I caught the bug as a teenager when I first started reading and memorizing poems that moved and intrigued me. Since then, reading and writing poetryâand having the pleasure of teaching it to studentsâhas been my best way of checking in with myself to see whatâs most important to me that I may have lost sight of in the daily bustle. Itâs also my best way of going beyond myselfâallowing my imagination to carry me to unexpected places.
Iâm captivated by the speakers in these poems: Russian monks, totally committed to their faith, whose god is more a product of their imaginations than something that can exist without them. In fact, this god is lonely, anxious, and dependent on the artist-monks for his existence.
With images of cathedral-building, prisons (prisons of the self, that is), and sunrises, Rilke brings to life a mysterious form of devotion that is also a kind of art. These poems are haunting and peaceful at the same time and very beautiful.
Although The Book of Hours is the work of Rilke's youth, it contains the germ of his mature convictions. Written as spontaneously received prayers, these poems celebrate a God who is not the Creator of the Universe but rather humanityitself and, above all, that most intensely conscious part of humanity, the artist. Babette Deutsch's classic translations-born from "the pure desire to sing what thepoet sang" (Ursula K. Le Guin)-capture the rich harmony and suggestive imagery of the originals, transporting the reader to new heights of inspiration and musicality.
I grew up on a tiny peninsula in Downeast Maine, an evocative and rugged place, both lovely and haunting. As a girl, walking home late down gravel roads through an encompassing darkness Iâve found nowhere else, I sensed the worldâs dangers long before I knew how to articulate them. Surrounded by woods, water, and unnerving quiet broken by the foxâs scream and rustling branches, I began to write. I sought out strange and unsettling books by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King (his home just a few towns away from mine) that left their mark. Storytelling became a way to process and explore what keeps me up at night.Â
Horrifying, brutal, sinuous, and uncanny, this one floored me. It evokes the peril of girlhood and womanhood with unwavering intensity.
Each story is fresh and unexpected, yet also timeless, rich with wisdom and mythology centuries old. Steeped in painful history, past atrocities twine with the present to nightmarish effect.
Mariana EnrĂquez is part of a new vanguard of Argentine and Latin American Gothic writers alongside Samanta Schweblin. Their writing, born from real-world horrors, is among the most thrilling discoveries Iâve made in years.Â
'A portrait of a world in fragments, a mirrorball made of razor blades' Guardian
Sleep-deprived fathers conjuring phantoms; sharp-toothed children and stolen skulls; persecuted young women drawn to self-immolation. Organized crime sits side-by-side with the occult in Buenos Aires - a place where reality and the preternatural fuse into strange, new shapes. These stories follow the wayward and downtrodden, revealing the scars of Argentina's dictatorship and the ghosts and traumas that have settled in the minds of its people. Provocative, brutal and uncanny, Things We Lost in the Fire is a paragon of contemporary Gothic from a writer of singularâŠ
At twenty-six I was living in Wuhan. I had been in China for a couple of years and was looking for a change. Not ready to go back home to New Zealand, I made my way across Europe, through the USA, and on to Argentina. Since that visit, Iâve followed Argentina's economic crises and scoured its newspapers for quirky crime stories. I started to send out true crime articles to various magazines. Eventually, I had enough material to write a novel. For years Iâve wanted to find a literary yet straightforward crime novel set in Argentina. The search goes on, but below are the best Iâve come across so far.
More about hiding out and the lead-up to the final shoot-out than the bank robbery at the start, this novel is based on a real case from the 1960s. After they rob a bank in the Province of Buenos Aires, Dorda and Brigone, escape with the money over the Rio de la Plata. They find a bolthole in Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, a country much like Argentina culturally and historically, but with fewer hysterical tendencies. Not happy about this are the politicians and police officers involved in the robbery and anxious for their cut of the loot. Piglia does a good job of recreating Argentina in the 1960s. Despite some stylistic pretensions and his overwriting of the main characters, the author manages not to get in the way of the story.
Based on original reports and witness statements, Money to Burn tells the story of a gang of bandits who, fancying themselves as urban guerillas, raided a bank in downtown Buenos Aires. They escaped with millions of dollars in cash but six weeks later found their hideout surrounded by three hundred military police, journalists and TV cameras. The subsequent siege and its shocking outcome have become a Latin American legend.
At twenty-six I was living in Wuhan. I had been in China for a couple of years and was looking for a change. Not ready to go back home to New Zealand, I made my way across Europe, through the USA, and on to Argentina. Since that visit, Iâve followed Argentina's economic crises and scoured its newspapers for quirky crime stories. I started to send out true crime articles to various magazines. Eventually, I had enough material to write a novel. For years Iâve wanted to find a literary yet straightforward crime novel set in Argentina. The search goes on, but below are the best Iâve come across so far.
An Agatha Christie-style mystery set in Buenos Aires. At two in the morning, Pancho Soler returns drunk to his apartment building on Santa Fe Avenue. He presses the button for the lift, and it arrives with a surprise inside: a beautiful blonde woman, sitting upright, but dead. Many of the suspects who live in the building are recent immigrants from Europe and, as the novel is set in the 1950s, their memories and secrets from WW2 are still fresh. Boris, a Bulgarian chemist who worked for the Nazis, is the most entertaining of the lot. There are the usual red herrings and revelations in the search for the murderer. The young Argentinian detective is a little flat by Christie's standards, but this is a satisfying whodunnit.  Â
Frida Eidinger is young, beautiful and lying dead in the lift of a luxury Buenos Aires apartment block.
It looks like suicide, and yet none of the building's residents can be trusted; the man who discovered her is a womanising drunk; her husband is behaving strangely; and upstairs, a photographer and his sister appear to be hiding something sinister. When Inspector Ericourt and his colleague Blasi are set on the trail of some missing photographs, a disturbing secret past begins to unravel...
One of Argentina's greatest detective stories, Death Going Down is a postwar tale of survival and extortion, obsessionâŠ
My name is Rebecca Sanford, and my debut novel is based on the historical events of Argentina's last military dictatorship and the work of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. As a graduate student in the international affairs program at The New School, I conducted field research for my master's thesis with the Identity Archive of the Grandmothers at the University of Buenos Aires. This experience inspired a fictional story that ultimately became The Disappeared.
In this book, Laura Alcoba recounts memories of her childhood from the tender perspective of a 7-year-old girl whose parents are being targeted by Argentinaâs dictatorship. Laura and her family hide out in a small house on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where a resistance movement is operating a secret printing press behind the façade of a rabbit farm.
Through snippets of conversations that she isnât meant to understand (but does) and strict rules of secrecy intended to protect her, wonder and curiosity prevail. I loved seeing this hidden world through Lauraâs eyes.
Laura was 7 years old when her parents' political sympathies began to draw the attention of the dictator's regime. Before long, her father was imprisoned and Laura and her mother were forced to leave their apartment in the capital of Buenos Aires to go into hiding in a small, run-down house on the outskirts. This is the rabbit house where the resistance movement is building a secret printing press, and setting up a rabbit farm to conceal their activities. Laura now finds herself living a clandestine existence - crouching beneath a blanket in the car on her way to school,âŠ
People behave rationally and irrationally. Observing and thinking about human nature is the sport of my lifetime. In literature and art, I worship real wit. I thirst for the unusual, the deadpan, the acknowledging of one thing while another slips in unseen. Wit has been, for me, a shield and a tool for good. I try not to use it as a weapon because wit as a weapon often damages a wider target than one intends. I strive to endow my fictional women, my protagonists, with sharp yet understated wit that spares no one, not even themselves. Especially not themselves. The books I recommend here live up to my standards.
Protagonist Vera Kellyâs personality is the kind I grew up with in my blue-collar neighborhood. Sample line: âIn fact I could tell she wanted to like me, which was probably why my first instinct was to lie to her.â Right on: If you didnât have a cynical edge, youâd be somebodyâs toast sooner or later.
Vera, a tech-savvy spy in the midst of the South American political upheaval of the 1960s, makes no big announcement about being queer, and she doesnât consider herself some frail victim either. Cheers to that! I can relate.
Although I consider most contemporary novels to be tricked up and dumbed down, this oneâs an exception. The writingâs unapologetically smart. I dig it. Iâm in Mensa; what can I say?
New York City, 1962. Vera Kelly is struggling to make rent and blend into the underground gay scene in Greenwich Village. She's working night shifts at a radio station when her quick wits, sharp tongue, and technical skills get her noticed by a recruiter for the CIA.
Next thing she knows she's in Argentina, tasked with wiretapping a congressman and infiltrating a group of student activists in Buenos Aires. As Vera becomes more and more enmeshed with the young radicals, the fragile local government begins to split at the seams. When a betrayal leaves her stranded in the wake ofâŠ
For me, games have always been a way of playing mathematics. Every game has a hidden piece of mathematics behind it, and if you can understand that mathematics, Iâve found that it gives you a real edge in playing the game. I travel a lot for my work as a mathematician, and I love to ask about the games they play when I visit a new country. Games tell me a lot about the culture and people I am visiting. My book is my way of sharing my passion for games and mathematics with my readers.
Anyone who recognizes the title of this book is probably a Risk player. Itâs the name of a rather obscure territory in this strategy board game of conflict and conquest, one that I love playing with my kids. The game is an important motif in this Spanish novel by Figueras.
The book, set in Argentina during the 1976 coup, is the enchanting story of a young boy trying to make sense of a world during a time of extraordinary upheaval. It beautifully illustrates how a game can provide an escape from the horrors of real life. By the way, if you want a tip for playing Risk, my mathematical analysis of the game reveals that North America is the best continent to occupy.
In Buenos Aires, in the mid-Seventies, a ten-year-old boy lives in world of school lessons and Superman comics, TV shows and games of Risk - a world in which men have superpowers and boys can conquer the globe on a square of cardboard. But in the outside world, a military junta have taken power; and amid a political climate of fear and intimidation, people are beginning to disappear without trace...
When his mother unexpectedly takes the boy and his kid brother out of classes, she tells them they're going on an impromptu family 'holiday'. But he soon realizes that theâŠ
