The Book of Sand

Jorge Luis Borges · 1899–1986 · Argentina

Originally El libro de arena (Spanish)

Why it matters

A book with infinitely many pages, a double glimpsed on a park bench, a blind man cataloguing his own vanishing memory. Borges's last major collection, sparer than his 1940s peak but no less vertiginous.

At a glance

Plainer, stripped-down sentences than his earlier work still coil around the same dense paradoxes.