Fiction and the Fantastic: Stories by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian with rock star status, a stimulus for magical realism who was not a magical realist, and a wholly original writer who catalogued and defined his own precursors. It’s fitting that he was fascinated by paradoxes, and his most famous stories are fantasias on themes at the heart of this series: dreams, mirrors, recursion, labyrinths, language and creation. Marina and Chloe explore Borges’s fiction with particular focus on two stories: ‘The Circular Ruins’ and ‘The Aleph’. They discuss the many contradictions and puzzles in his life and work, and the ways in which he transformed the writing of his contemporaries, successors and distant ancestors. This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecryt In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsyt Further reading in the LRB: Michael Wood on Borges’s collected fiction: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n... Colm Toíbìn on Borges’s life: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v28/n... Marina Warner on enigmas and riddles: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n... Daniel Wassbeim on Sur and Borges’s circle: ⁠https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v10/n... Next episode: Marina and Chloe discuss The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. ABOUT CLOSE READINGS Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day. Find more episodes here:    • Close Readings   Subscribe: https://lrb.me/closereadingsyt LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre' and Bee Wilson's 'Complicated Women'. https://lrb.me/audiobooksff ABOUT THE LRB The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance. As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.