Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Jorges Luis Borges and Raymond Carver at their best. Four timeless tales from the abstract minds of four of our greatest sci-fi authors. A thrill a minute..!

These stories read like they are translated verbatim without any consideration of how enjoyable the end product will be. Hurley's sentences are frigid and mechanical, lacking much of the simplicity and brevity that makes Borges great. Only some of Borges's stories are supposed to read like encyclopedia entries.

Di Giovanni's translations are far more readable. After all, Di Giovanni worked closely with Borges during translation, and Borges himself had a pretty good understanding of the English language.

Having said that, I'm grateful that these stories are finally available in a single volume. But I feel the book would have been much better had Hurley only translated the stories for which a good translation does not already exist.

What a treasure this book is! The Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges's fictional works are the ultimate celebration of the power of the imagination, each story a unique, glittering gem worthy of careful and repeated inspection. Combining abstract concepts with familiar elements of the real world, Borges works in a genre that could be called philosophical fantasy -- an exploration of the myriad ways of interpreting and portraying reality and unreality.

I have encountered no writer more eclectic than Borges; there is no place on earth and no time in history in which he is uninterested or unwilling to take inspiration. He writes about sorcerors, pirates, impostors, hoodlums, samurai, detectives, troglodytes, gauchos, kings, primitive tribes, artifacts, fantastic libraries, imaginary worlds, imaginary books, lost civilizations, and alternate realities with astonishingly equal aplomb. Much of the writing is immersed in cultural mysticism (the Kabbalah), traditional religions (the Koran, the Talmud, the Bible), mythology (Greek, Arabian, Oriental), philosophy (particularly Schopenhauer), world history, and lore of Borges's own invention. Motifs of knives, mirrors, and especially labyrinths -- both physical and metaphysical -- recur throughout many of the stories.

The titles alone invoke immediate intrigue: "The Garden of Forking Paths," "The Library of Babel," "The Cult of the Phoenix," "The Immortal," "The Sect of the Thirty," "The Mirror and the Mask," "Toenails," et cetera. Borges takes the typical detective story and elevates it to lofty levels of erudition -- one can see how he influenced Umberto Eco. "Death and the Compass" is a mystery with a geometrical solution, "Ibn-Hakam al-Bokhari, Murdered in His Labyrinth" embellishes its clever plot by merging two disparate cultures, while the eerie "There Are More Things" takes its inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft. Some stories, like "The House of Asterion" and "Everything and Nothing," are like riddles, while others are rich romantic tales of the tough barrios of Buenos Aires.

This collection is a marvel -- perfect for engaging your intellect and purging yourself of the mundane.

Some earlier reviewers complained about the quality of the translation of this collection of stories by Andrew Hurley, especially when compared to the collaboration between Jorge Luis Borges, (JLB, as he liked to sign), and Norman Thomas di Giovanni in preparing Labyrinths. (I suggest you read all reviews in the order they were written.) As one reasonably familiar with JLB's oeuvre, (a word JLB disliked), I state unequivocally that paying six dollars more for four times the number of stories in Labyrinths is a great bargain. Beyond nickels and dimes, it is precisely because the works of JLB were erstwhile translated into English in bits and pieces that his recognition as a gifted writer took so long in coming. (Jean-Pierre Berne's two-volume French translation, Oeuvres completes, is highly recommended.)

American-born writer, editor, translator and collaborator, di Giovanni, was JLB's personal assistant in Buenos Aires from 1968 to 1972. I shall now illustrate specifically how his style of translation differed from that of Hurley with the story "The Gospel According to Saint Mark." In characterizing the Gutre family when they first met Espinosa, di Giovanni wrote "They were barely articulate," (in English, that is), while Hurley scribed "They rarely spoke." While the former sentence explains why "the Gutres, who knew so much about things in the country, did not know how to explain them," (page 398 in this book), the latter indicated an aloofness if not suspicion of Espinosa from their first meeting which addresses the irony of the ending. In depicting their eagerness to have St. Mark read to them after dinner, Hurley wrote "In the following days, the Gutres would wolf down the spitted beef and canned sardines in order to arrive sooner at the Gospel" while di Giovanni essayed "The Gutres took to bolting their barbecued meat and their sardines so as not to delay the Gospel." Where di Giovanni deciphered JLB's allusions to Herbert Spencer, W. H. Hudson and Charles I, Hurley explicated the origin of Baltasar Espinosa, the whereabouts of Ramos Mejia and the theme of the novel, Don Segundo Sombra. Take your pick.

Finally, JLB habitually changed texts from edition to edition, especially in his poetry. It is then problematic to determine the faithfulness of the translations. Rest assured that, though rhyme and rhythm are compromised in any translation, in Hurley's rendering, the brilliance and magic of each story is preserved down to, say, the symbolism of the goldfinch at the conclusion of the illustrative yarn, "The Gospel According to Saint Mark."

I give this book 4 stars because I honestly don't feel that it's his best collection. That honor would go to his collection of short stories entitled, THE BOOK OF SAND. LABYRINTHS comes in a close second or third. But for the beginning Borges reader, this is an EXCELLENT place to start. The book is divided into two primary parts: Borges's parables and super-short stories; and his poems. There's nothing over three pages long in here, except the introduction. Naturally, I found lots of quotable lines and paragraphs in this work. The translation is very good, too. It definitely sounds like Borges, and the tranlators even manage to get some of his poems to rhyme while still getting across that Borgesian feeling. You'd almost think that all of this stuff was written in English to begin with. Assuming you haven't read Borges, he's very intellectual, knows lots about history and books, and loves to write on the subjects of tigers, yellow, blindness, Dante, Martin Fierro, and *the other Borges*. Hope you like this book.

dreamtigers has languished on my shelf for over a year... for some reason i just couldn't get into it. foolish me.

this little book broken into two parts- a collection of short pieces some poetry. all very brief- the longest passage occupies a little over two pages.

what i'm really struck by is how personal this collection is. i've seen borges as a towering intellect but rather cold. dreamtigers has forced me to re-evaluate this- there's tenderness, loss and affection in these works.

borges is always dazzling, and the second part is a good introduction to his poetry, of which i understand there is a lot. the introductory and appendix notes are most illuminating.

I am not an avid reader of poetry, but Dreamtigers (which is about half poetry, half prose) ranks in my top five favorite books of all time. Borges never ceases to amaze me. I am always being reminded of his work as I read other books. It's actually kind of hard to put into words, but Dreamtigers is one of the most complete books ever written -- it amplifies and compliments itself and gives you a truly unique insight into the mind and the world.

Truly unique.

If you have read Eco's masterpiece and you would like to understand it thoroughly, then this is a good place to start. Influences from this book may also be seen in other modern fiction (for example Paul Auster's New York Trilogy).

The selected stories and essays presented here provide a schematic upon which many a great novel could be based. However, Borges' writing style is brief, and readers who desire voluptuous sentences should look elsewhere.

The book also appeals to those who may be looking for something spiritual in their reading. Although obviously the work does not answer any universal questions, it may lead the curious reader to the clues that he/she needs to start their search.

Jorge Luis Borges is the personification of one of the most famous rules in the style guide of the magazine The Economist -- 'be succinct'. He never wrote a novel, and his stories are often very short indeed. One critic thinks of them more as plotlines than as finished stories. But what stories! Terse, pared to the bone, free of anything extraneous, yet charged with wry and detached humor, Borges takes us to amazing and often horrific universes in which literary, mathematical, scientific and philosophical riddles are made real. Here are stories exploring the nature of existence and the meaning of infinity, but which still work as powerful narratives. The plainness of the prose (I have only read it in English translation, of course) only throws the emotional impact of Borges' tales into sharper relief. In 'Kafka and his precursors', Borges lampoons the very idea of authorship, yet his own influences are clear. He is as journalistic and rational as his heroes, Wells and Poe, and has a sharp, ironic style every bit as focused as Kafka, but if anything even harder hitting. The themes sound lofty, and they are -- but the execution is much more accessible than one would think, and it often has the beauty of the abbreviated, Japanese poetic form called the Haiku: I think of phrases such as "some birds, a horse, saved the ruins of an amphitheatre". My first copy of Labyrinths was given to me by my father for something to read while I was recuperating from a medical operation. I've read it so often it's fallen to pieces, and I've had to buy a second copy. If I only ever had one book, this would be it. Like a book in one of Borges' other collections, Labyrinths looks like an ordinary book from the outside. From the inside, it's infinite in extent.

These stories are unlike anything else I know of in literature. Borges is a completely original genius, whose erudition and playfulness is exceeded only by his love of language, and the unforgettable structure of his prose.

Like Joyce, like Nabokov, like no other writer, Borges creates his own world, which exists at an oblique angle to our own. Probably nothing I have ever read has had such an effect on my thinking as these five-page stories. They are like metaphysical poems in prose.

And they are endlessly entertaining. I must have read "The Library of Babel" and "Pierre Menard, Author of the *Quixote*" dozens of times each.

And the short essays at the end of this volume are in their own way just as entrancing. He is a magical writer -- one of the great artists of this century.

This offers a series of interviews in chronlogical order (from 1966 until shortly before his death in '85) While he is good humored and self effacing he never lets you know more than he wants you to. There are also certain repetitons of ideas that occur, but anyone that has read Borges before will be used to that. To some extent it happans with most of the better writers in varying degrees anyways. Even with the repetitions it never comes across like he is doing memorized routines (which sometimes happans with William burroughs interviews)all in all important insight into the mind of an important writer.

Borges is great in in his writings, and almost as good in conversation. Witty, urbane, stylish, Borges shows that conversation can be as exciting as literature. Buy now!

This collection is an excellent introduction to Borges, and clearly shows how he revolutionized the short story and became the pater familias of a new genre classification.

"The Aleph"--Like most of his stories, this one is brief but packs a lot of information into its short length. (For those who don't read outside of SF, imagine a J.G. Ballard condensed novel with more connections and a higher sense of the fantastic. Hmm, that was a worthless description. It is hard to find a match for Borges in the genre, because he was always succinct, and could never have survived in the dog-eat-dog world of pay by word.) The gimmick is simple--the aleph is to space what eternity is to time--but the method by which the author discovers it is unusual. I like Borges because his approach to a fantastic concept is unlike any found in the genre. Genre writing seems to emphasize the gimmick, in mainstream writing it is simply one part of the landscape against which the characters are placed. Only in Borges do all elements seem equal, similar in concept to his own aleph, to return in a style similar to Borges himself.

"Streetcorner Man"--A first-person tale of one night in the barrio, when the ones who talk big get their comeuppance by the quiet ones. OK, but I like my stories to have a little something more.

"The Approach to aI-Mu'tasim"--A review of a fictional book which reads, again, like a condensed novel, only in this case it truly is one. The literary device is ingenious, allowing Borges to comment on literary criticism at the same time he is creating literature.

"The Circular Ruins"--One of Borges' favorite subjects is the concept of infinity, another is creation. Here he bends the two together in a story that is also a metaphor for the process of setting and achieving goals.

"Death and the Compass"--A logic problem to a mystery story, almost like Poe. Poe, though, would have stretched it out to twice its length.

"The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (1829-1874)"--I did not quite follow this one. At one point I thought that maybe Cruz was going to be killing his own father, but instead he goes to the aid of himself?

"The Two Kings and Their Two Labyrinths"--A fable, or a sermon, that addresses what is a labyrinth. Highly appropriate subject for a Borges collection.

"The Dead Man"--A gaucho story. Think of it as a Louis L'amour story with Argentines and Brazilians instead of Mexicans and Texans. Okay, but it's still a western at heart.

"The Other Death"--This is what I look for in Borges: a fantastical study of memory and history, reality and dream. Pedro did not act like a hero in the battle... or did he?

"Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth"--Another great story of mazes and mystery. Borges has an unusual way of framing his tales, usually with an objective third person narrator, that shortens the stories tremendously. I guess he did not get paid by the word.

"The Man On the Threshold"--Another mystery, but not quite as fantastic as the others. Some Of these stories are morality or revenge plays, that do not require much speculation.

"The Challenge"--A rehash of some of the gaucho themes, certainly my last favorite of his tropes. What I find interesting is the references to other stories flirt makes this seem like a reference article instead of a story.

"The Captive"--A short short about a boy captured as a young child by natives. Borges here formulates a question about the nature of memory.

"Borges and Myself"--Here, as in "Isidore Cruz" above, Borges talks about the nature of identity. When you look at how others perceive you and realize that that is not how you perceive yourself is a crisis of identity (as in here), or how people might perceive a younger version of you. I often look at my current life and wonder. There is no way that Glen circa. 1980 could have ever dreamed of becoming the Glen of 1998. Thoughts and hopes and goals are all so mutable. The funny thing is that I will reread these words 10 or more years from now and be struck by the same strangeness.

"The Maker"--A discussion of what it means to go blind, nominally about Homer, but also about Borges' own condition. I had not realized that Borges had gone blind before his death.

"The Intruder"--Borges says that his mother, who he dictated this story to, hated it, and I can see why. It's not something I would recommend to any woman, as it is quite misogynstic. However, it is an incredible story, and a fairly straightforward one for Borges, about friendship and brotherhood.

"The Immortals"--A science fiction tale, strangely incongruous here. Well done, but it seems much more dated than almost everything else in this collection (stories from 1933 to 1969).

"The Meeting"--Clever little tale about people and weapons. Almost a trick story, because the title refers to something other than what you expect.

"Pedro Salvadores"--Short short about dictatorships and living "underground" (actually, both literally and figuratively). Borges had a real knack for the short short, never an easy thing to write.

"Rosendo's Tale"--To come almost entirely full circle, this tale is a sequel or antidote to the second story, "Streetcorner Man." The gaucho here is more realistic, not so macho, and I find myself appreciating this more because of having seen the Hemingway-ish earlier story.

Finally, there is an autobiographical essay at the end, for those of us who wonder how Borges evolved (as Borges himself does in "Borges and Myself").

This book is very usefull for all readers of Borges`s works. You can find very interesting things.

This book, by noted Argentinian writer, essayist and librarian Jorge Luis Borges, is one of the most complete and imaginitively compiled cyclopedias of mythical beings. Though it focuses mainly on western mythology, this book is a comprehensive look at the beasts that have haunted the dark forests of our minds for millenia.

Jorge Luis Borges stands out as the most compelling and influential Latin American writer of his time. Yet his fame came slowly. He was given international acclaim while ignored in his homeland of Argentina. Who is this man Borges, whose life is an enigma to those who have encountered him in print?

The answer to that question is found in this superb literary biograpy of Borges by James Woodall. Borges:A Life, explores the Borges the man and the forces which made him into one of the greatest writers in the twentieth century. Drawing on interviews, Borges' works, and detailed readings of letters and other resources the author unravels the life of the man. In doing so you are given invaluable insight about "Georgie" (as he is called by the author) yet there is still an element of mystery that surrounds him.

Although born in Argentina, Borges was a dedicated Anglophile throughout his life. Literature came alive for him through the English language. His early youth was spent in Europe but it wasn't until he returned home that he was able to embark on his own writing career.

The writer Borges loves to startle the reader and sends you through a maze of complexity that challenges reality. His symbolic use of mirror images and his double puts a twist on literature that has never been done before. Woodall paints a picture of an eccentric man with this powerful gift of telling a story. Although primarily known as a fiction writer, Borges was highly astute in writing poetry and essays.

This is an enjoyable biography of a shy man who becomes accessible to the reader. There are some things in Borges life that arouse questions concerning his integrity. Borges appears to ignore those questions of military dictatorship (in Argentina) and some of his racist comments regarding Indians and Blacks. He moves beyond those distractions and manages to find himself a literary icon. By all means, read this great book about a great man.

Herbert Asbury's "Gangs of New York" was an expose first published in 1927. Its style shows its age: reading this book is like listening to an old 1920's newspaper reporter from the far end of the bar after he's had too many drinks: lots of exotic tall tales of life in the gritty city; countless names and places rise and disappear never to be heard again. The overall effect is entertaining but completely unbelievable, as though Paul Bunyon had moved to the Lower East Side of 19th-century Manhattan.

One illustration will suffice: the early gangster "Mighty Mose" is describe as 'at least 8 feet tall' wearing boots studded with inch-long spikes.On one occasion Asbury has Mose pulling an oak tree out of the ground by its roots to 'smite' some of a rival gang, the Dead Rabbits. On another the author claims Mose swam underwater from Manhattan to Staten Island without coming up for air. It comes off as the kind of book a boy would have hidden in a corncrib to read when it was first published in 1927: lowlife fun, but if you're looking for the real history, you will be disappointed.

You will be even FURTHER disappointed if you expect the book to resemble the new Scorcese movie in any manner. Although Scorcese borrows the names of characters from the book - Bill the Butcher, Jack Scirocco, Vallon, Everdeane - and sets the movie around the time of the 1863 Draft Riots, which really occured - in the book these characters are sometimes separated by 50 years and 100 pages. The character played by Leonardo diCaprio, Amsterdam Vallon, does not appear at all in the book.

I first read the book before the movie was filmed, because of my interest in New York history. It's entertaining although the writing style is pretty archaic. But if you came to this page looking for the 'true story' behind the movie, you won't find it here.

Recently re-published to coincide with the upcoming film release of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York, this is a long out-of-print look at a depraved and sinister metropolis at the turn of the last century. Tracing a history of crime, corruption and vice from the latter half of the nineteenth century through the rise of Tammany Hall in the early 20th Century, Gangs of New York is a singularly entertaining and disturbing look at the bloodstains lurking under the sepia tint of a romanticized past. Perhaps even more fascinating than the insights into the rampant crime underworld is Asbury's near-parallel narrative of the formation of the modern New York City police force, focusing on the police riots during the merger of the Metropolitan Municipal and Metropolitan police departments into what we now know as the NYPD. It's a tale filled with graft and corruption rivaling that of the numerous and bloody gangs that populate the book. An essential book for fans of historical crime works such as Luc Sante's Low Life, as well as anyone truly interested in the real history of New York.

America was never so violent as it was in the decades that flanked the Civil War, and Asbury sketches the immigrants, gangsters, gamblers and river pirates that ruled the slums of Five Points with a deft, half-loving hand. I was especially surprised to learn how politics fueled the gangs' long reign, each party keeping its own thug army to riot and break ballot boxes on command. Today's problems with guns, race prejudice and political apathy look like an ice cream social next to Asbury's New York, which ran on the kind of offical gangsterism you associate most often with the Third World. No wonder Scorsese picked this up--it takes "Goodfellas" to the tenth power. At the same time, Asbury hints at the rigid codes of honor that governed gang life, another Scorese trademark. The book evokes a forgotten America where the line between criminal and respectable was less rigid. I can't say I'd want to live there, but while it was more lawless, Asbury also leaves you wondering if it was maybe, just maybe, a little more free. At the very least, it puts some of our own 21st-century angst into perspective. A fun, easy read.