SOURCE: “Now in English Revision of Collected Fictions,” in Commonweal, Vol. 125, No. 22, December 18, 1998.

In the following review, Bell-Villada praises Collected Fictions.

From the midsixties through the early eighties, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges—the man and his thoughts both—seemed well-nigh ubiquitous. There were the appearances on TV, the standing-room-only lectures at college campuses, the bylines in the weeklies, even an interview in Commonweal (October 25, 1968). A shy, reclusive man, renowned for his complex, difficult art, Borges somehow burgeoned forth as everyone's favorite foreign author, the international man of letters for that era.

Following his death in Geneva in 1986, Borges's best works have settled into the rarefied ranks of the world's classics, while his most striking ideas have remained reliable currency, a part of our fin-de-siecle literary exchange. Fantastical realms invading ours; an effete French poet setting out to write Don Quixote; a cosmic library that houses every possible...