Stories about books within books. Infinite, perfectly symmetrical, recursive stories. Flights of allusional fancy. Poe mixed with Joyce mixed with Dali, armed with an enormous, multilingual vocabulary and multicultural semiology(and an apparently intimate knowledge of everything ever written in every Western language, and some of the Eastern ones), and yet somehow still eminently readable and engaging. Good stuff, in other words.

One of the joys of this recent anthology is the opportunity it affords to compare the plain, laconic style of Andrew Hurley’s new translation with the perhaps more florid style of prior English translations. I don’t find that I consistently prefer one set of translations to another; rather, I find that each translation highlights different aspects of each story, deepening my appreciation for Borges’ prose while making my ignorance of Spanish all the more upsetting.

I’ve read many of these short stories before in other collections, but this is all of ’em: the good and the bad.