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Jay Parini

A Beer with Borges

New nonfiction from NER 39.1

I can smell Borges in my dreams, and I dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn’t.

“View of the Riviera” by Chuka Susan Chesney, courtesy of the Aarnun Gallery.

A writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early forties. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, “shaping.” And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them.

I called him Mr. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. “Just Borges, please.”


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from NER 39.1
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Filed Under: News & Notes, Nonfiction Tagged With: Jay Parini, Jorge Luis Borges

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Comments

  1. Ulrica bell perkins says

    March 27, 2018 at 2:40 PM

    Love this. I adore Borges

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Vol. 43, No. 1

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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