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The Book of Imaginary Beings
Series: Brief Encounters
Brief Description
Experience a BRIEF ENCOUNTER with Jorge Luis Borges, master of metaphysical invention, in this playful bestiary of creatures real and unreal. A dazzling catalogue of beings drawn from the dreamworlds of myth, folklore, and imagination. From ancient myths to obscure legends, a strange menagerie takes shape:...
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The Book of Imaginary Beings
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Description
Experience a BRIEF ENCOUNTER with Jorge Luis Borges, master of metaphysical invention, in this playful bestiary of creatures real and unreal.
A dazzling catalogue of beings drawn from the dreamworlds of myth, folklore, and imagination.
From ancient myths to obscure legends, a strange menagerie takes shape: creatures part real, part invented, drawn from cultures across the world. Each is described with care, as if it might exist just beyond the edge of belief. The Book of Imaginary Beings is Jorge Luis Borges's playful, erudite bestiary of the fantastic. Curious and endlessly inventive, it explores the power of imagination to create entire worlds.
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781529986372
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 02 July 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Vintage Classics
Contributors:
- Translated by Andrew Hurley
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 13.0mm
Width: 128.0mm
Height: 197.0mm
Weight: 160g
Pages: 192
Collections
About the Author
Jorge Luis Borges (Author) Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and was educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our time, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories before his death in Geneva in 1986. He was director of the Argentine National Library from 1955 until 1973. Mario Vargas Llosa, in a tribute to Borges, has written: 'His is a world of clear, pure, and at the same time unusual ideas expressed in words of great directness and restraint. He was a superb storyteller. One reads most of Borges' tales with the hypnotic interest usually reserved for reading detective fiction...'
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The Library of Babel
Introducing Little Clothbound Classics—irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas, and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Jorge Luis Borges remains one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century, whose spellbinding tales of magic, mystery, and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of...Hardback$2300Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Fictions
The most popular anthology of Jorge Luis Borges's short stories, Fictions is a wildly original and influential collection of fantastic tales, translated from the Spanish with an afterword by Andrew Hurley in Penguin Modern Classics. Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes. Now...Paperback$2300Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
The Garden of Forking Paths
Fifty new books at £1 each, celebrating the pioneering spirit of the Penguin Modern Classics series, from inspiring essays to groundbreaking fiction and poetry. Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous. Fantastical tales of mazes, puzzles, lost labyrinths, and bookish mysteries, from the unique imagination of a literary magician.Paperback$299Unit price /UnavailableBackorderShips mid August -
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Jorge Luis Borges was a literary spellbinder whose tales of magic, mystery, and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his stories, including the celebrated Library of Babel.Paperback$2400Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Collected Fictions
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges brings together the complete oeuvre of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Spanning nearly five decades of his career, this compilation features Borges's creative journey from his early work The Universal History of Iniquity to his critically acclaimed collections Ficciones and The Aleph. With a masterful blend of reality and...Paperback$7499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
The Aleph
Borges' stories have a deceptively simple, almost laconic style. In maddeningly ingenious stories that play with the very form of the short story, Borges returns again and again to his themes- dreams, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gaucho knife-fighters, transparent tigers and the elusive nature of identity itself.Paperback$2400Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
The Book of Sand and Shakespeare's Memory
One of the most remarkable artists of our age. — Mario Vargas Llosa The Book of Sand was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes... combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as 'The Congress', 'Undr' and...Paperback$2400Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
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Though best known in the English-speaking world for his short fictions and poems, Borges is revered in Latin America equally as an immensely prolific and beguiling writer of non-fiction prose. In The Total Library, more than 150 of Borges' most brilliant pieces are brought together for the first time in one volume—all in superb new translations. More than a hundred...Paperback$4400Elsewhere:$4800Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
Labyrinths: Popular Penguins
Enter Borges' timeless worlds, where the ideal and the abstract challenge reality; where philosophical paradoxes and endless possibilities abound, and wisps of dream and magic are layered in eternal reoccurrence. To read Labyrinths is to glide through time, space, mythology and philosophy, as Borges' characters struggle towards devastating discovery. His essays and brief tantalising parables explore the enigmas of time,...Paperback$1599Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
This Craft of Verse
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Conversations – Volume 2
Recorded during Jorge Luis Borges’s final years, this second volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari provides a wide-ranging reflection on the life and work of Argentina’s master writer and favourite conversationalist. In Conversations – Volume 2, Borges and Ferrari engage in a dialogue that is both improvisational and frequently humorous as they touch on subjects as diverse as epic...Paperback$4699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
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Recorded during Borges’ final years, this third volume of his conversations with Osvaldo Ferrari offers a rare glimpse into the life and work of Argentina’s master writer and favourite conversationalist. In Conversations: Volume 3, Borges and Ferrari discuss subjects as diverse as film criticism, fantastic literature, science fiction, the Argentinian literary tradition, and the works of writers such as Bunyan,...Paperback$4699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks
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