God's spies: Stories in defiance of oppression

by Alberto Manguel (Editor), Vladimir Nabokov (Contributor), Ken Saro-Wiwa (Contributor)

English

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

407 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the 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 themselves.

Reviews

[Milena · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great collection of stories from writers around the world who have been subjected to or experienced govt oppression in some form or another. What I particularly like about these short stories is that they are truly global, rather than primarily Western/North American and European.