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Jay Parini

A Beer with Borges

March 20, 2018

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.”


[Read more]

 

from NER 39.1
order a copy today — or better yet, subscribe!

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

Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Sarah Audsley

Writer’s Notebook—Field Dress Portal

Writing this poem was not a commentary on a rivalry between the sister arts—poetry and painting—but more an experiment in the ekphrastic poetic mode.

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