Character Catalog

A foundational short story collection containing 'The Library of Babel', 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and 'Pierre Ménard, Author of the Quixote'. This book revolutionized world literature by inventing a narrative form blending the fantastical, philosophy, and fictional erudition.

Borges' second major short story collection, notably containing 'The Aleph' and 'Death and the Compass'. In it he explores themes of infinity, circular time, and labyrinths with unparalleled stylistic mastery.

A collection of literary and philosophical essays in which Borges analyzes authors, ideas, and paradoxes with fascinating erudition. This book reveals Borges as a universal reader and original thinker.

A hybrid work blending prose poems, fables, and short parables. Borges here achieves a form of maximum distillation, condensing entire universes into a few lines.

A short story collection marking a return to more direct and realistic writing, inspired by Kipling. Borges explores themes tied to Argentine identity, violence, and fate.

One of his last major collections, containing the eponymous story about a book with infinite pages. Written after his total blindness and dictated, it bears witness to an imagination intact and as vertiginous as ever.

The Library of Babel is total — its shelves record all possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographic symbols... that is to say, everything that it is possible to express, in all languages.

In the lower part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was spinning; then I understood that this movement was an illusion produced by the dizzying spectacles it contained. The Aleph's diameter must have been two or three centimeters, but cosmic space was contained within it, with no reduction in volume.

I must confess that I have often imagined the invention of the mirror and wondered whether it might not have been enough to build an entire mythology. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply mankind.

Together we have invented so many characters, so many plots, that I no longer always know where my imagination ends and yours begins. Perhaps that is how literature ought to work.

Borges's birthplace and main place of residence, whose neighbourhoods — notably Palermo where he grew up — deeply permeated his literary imagination. He walked its streets until his complete blindness, retaining in memory every detail of its urban labyrinths.

Borges served as its director from 1955 to 1973 and spent a large part of his professional life there. It is the real library that inspired him to create the metaphor of the 'Library of Babel', a universal labyrinth of all human knowledge.

Borges lived there as a teenager from 1914 to 1919, learned French and German, and discovered Schopenhauer. He chose to end his life there and died in 1986; he is buried in the Kings' Cemetery.

Borges stayed there from 1919 to 1921 and actively participated in the Ultraist movement, the first Spanish literary avant-garde. This experience forged his earliest skills as a writer and poet.

In 1967–1968, Borges delivered the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on poetry and literature there. These lectures, published under the title 'Seven Nights', earned him worldwide academic recognition.

Afflicted with hereditary retinal degeneration, Borges used magnifying glasses and thick-lensed spectacles throughout his life before losing his sight entirely. These objects symbolize the paradoxical tension between his passion for books and his progressive disability.

After becoming nearly completely blind, Borges navigated the streets of Buenos Aires — which he knew by heart — with a white cane. He made it a literary symbol, saying that darkness had forced him to invent a new inner vision.

Director of the National Library of Argentina from 1955 to 1973, Borges was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of books he could no longer read. This library was the direct inspiration for his best-known work, 'The Library of Babel'.

Before losing his sight, Borges typed his texts on a typewriter. After going blind, he dictated his works to his mother and later to secretaries, but the typewriter remained on his desk as a symbol of his craft as a writer.

Borges had both a phobia and an obsessive fascination with mirrors, which appear throughout many of his short stories. He said that mirrors 'populate space' by multiplying images, and saw in them a metaphor for identity and infinity.

In his eponymous short story, Borges invents a book with infinite pages that can never be found twice. This fictional object illustrates his literary obsession with infinity, the labyrinth, and philosophical paradoxes.