Alberto Manguel
author profile
gender
male
place of birth
Buenos Aires, Argentina
website
genre
Literature & Fiction, Nonfiction
about this author
Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991).
Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and t...more
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upcoming events
A Translator's Discoveries with Alberto Manguel on tour for the book "The Library at Night"
Author appearance, February 10, 2010 07:00PM
Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York, NY, The United States
Selected Shorts The master translator, anthologist, and booklover (the library ...more
Author appearance, February 10, 2010 07:00PM
Peter Jay Sharp Theatre, Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th Street, New York, NY, The United States
Selected Shorts The master translator, anthologist, and booklover (the library ...more
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Alberto Manguel - La Biblioteca de Noche
Alberto Manguel — The Library at Night
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Alberto Manguel — The Library at Night
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"At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book--that string of confused, alien ciphers--shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader."
— Alberto Manguel
— Alberto Manguel
"Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common fate of the grave. But books grant us myriad possibilities: the possibility of change, the possibility of illumination."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)
"I soon discovered that one doesn't simply read Crime and Punishment or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. One reads a certain edition, a specific copy, recognizable by the roughness or the smoothness of its paper, by its scent, by a slight tear on page 72 and a coffee ring on the right-hand corner of the back cover. "
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)
— Alberto Manguel (A History of Reading)


























