Book Of Imaginary Beings, The

Few readers will want, or be able, to resist this modern bestiary. Here you will find the familiar - Gryphons, Minotaurs and Unicorns - as well as the Monkey of the inkpot and other undeniably curious beasts. Borges' cunning and humorous commentary is sheer delight.
As we all know, there is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition-The compilation and translation of this volume have given us a great deal of such pleasure; we hope the reader will share some of the fun we felt when ransacking the bookshelves of the Biblioteca Nacional-' from the Preface

About the 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...'