Blue Library
9831 Racconti brevi e straordinari
Edited by Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares
1973 / 160 PAGES.
Language: Italian
The tales collected here stand out for their instant peculiarity and terseness. Most of the book is ancient, religious, fantastical in nature; in addition to the “generous Oriental sources”, here Borges and Bioy Casares invite us to another one of their feasts.
Anthologies are criticised for their gaps, but these gaps cannot exist when a “genre” is defined by the anthologists’ choices. If Borges did not exist, readers would simply skim these excerpts distractedly; instead, we detect surprising influences of this style and inventions in authors far apart in space and time. These “brief and extraordinary” anecdotes offer the same benefits: sporadic reading, memorisation, easy quotability, as we appreciate their swift intellectual interplay and wild symmetries.