On WritingContents Introduction by Suzanne Jill Levine
A Note on the Translations
I. Becoming a Man of Letters
• Ultra Manifesto
• On Expressionism
• After Images
• Joyce’s
Ulysses •
The Ballad of Reading Gaol II. Word Music
• Verbiage for Poems
• An Investigation of the Word
• The Art of Verbal Abuse
• On Literary Description
• On Metaphor
• Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass III. On Translation
• Two Ways to Translate
• The Homeric Versions
IV. Reading as Writing
• A Profession of Literary Faith
• Literary Pleasure
• The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader
• The Paradox of Apollinaire
• Kafka and his Precursors
• Flaubert and his Exemplary Destiny
V. The Critic at Work
• Virginia Woolf
• T. S. Eliot
• Paul Valéry
• William Faulkner,
Absalom, Absalom! • Herman Mellville,
Bartleby the Scrivener • Henry James,
The Abasement of the Northmores • Marcel Schwob,
Imaginary Lives • H. G. Wells,
The Time Machine; The, Invisible Man • Julio Cortázar,
Stories VI. The Perfect Plot
• The Labyrinths of the Detective Story and Chesterton
• Ellery Queen,
The Halfway House • Adolfo Bioy Casares,
The Invention of Morel • Wilkie Collins,
The Moonstone • The Detective Story
VII. Narrative Art
• Stories from Turkestan
• The Cinematograph, the Biograph
• Narrative Art and Magic
• Preface to the 1954 edition of
A Universal History of Infamy • When Fiction Lives in Fiction
Notes Sources
Copyright © 2010 by Jorge Luis Borges. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.