Historia universal de la infamia

by Jorge Luis Borges

En este primer libro de ficción, Jorge Luis Borges trabaja con biografías de ladrones y rufianes; personajes y traidores y a veces también heroicos. Aquí están, entre otros, Lazarus Morell, redentor de esclavos; Tom Castro, hijo apócrifo y tolerante; y la viuda Ching, hábil en el saqueo de altamar. Cuentos que juegan a falsear y tergiversar historias ajenas. Le siguen Hombre de la esquina rosada, uno de sus relatos más celebrados y Etcétera, un testimonio de sus incontable lecturas.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Literature, Magical Realism, Spanish Literature, Latin American

136 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1935

About the author

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genève. The family travelled widely in Europe, including Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library and professor of English Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. He became completely blind by the age of 55. Scholars have suggested that his progressive blindness helped him to create innovative literary symbols through imagination. By the 1960s, his work was translated and published widely in the United States and Europe. Borges himself was fluent in several languages.
In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first Formentor Prize, which he shared with Samuel Beckett. In 1971, he won the Jerusalem Prize. His international reputation was consolidated in the 1960s, aided by the growing number of English translations, the Latin American Boom, and by the success of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. He dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city of Geneva, Switzerland. Writer and essayist J.M. Coetzee said of him: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish-American novelists."