"The Book of Sand" | |
---|---|
Short story by Jorge Luis Borges | |
Original title | El libro de arena |
Country | Argentina |
Language | Spanish |
Genre(s) | Fantasy, short story |
Publication | |
Published in | The Book of Sand |
Media type | |
Publication date | 1975 |
Published in English | 1977 |
Pages | 6 (Dutton 1977 ed.) |
"The Book of Sand" (Spanish: El libro de arena) is a 1975 short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges about the discovery of a book with infinite pages. It has parallels to the same author's 1949 story "The Zahir" (revised in 1974), continuing the theme of self-reference and attempting to abandon the terribly infinite, and to his 1941 story "The Library of Babel" about an infinite library.
The story was first published in 1975, in Spanish, as the last of 13 stories in a book of the same name. The first English translation—by Norman Thomas di Giovanni—was published in The New Yorker . The entire volume The Book of Sand ( ISBN 0-525-47540-0) first appeared in English in 1977.
An unnamed narrator is visited by a tall Scots Bible-seller, who presents him with a very old cloth-bound book that he bought in India from an Untouchable. The book is emblazoned with the title "Holy Writ," below which title is emblazoned "Bombay," [1] but is said to be called "The Book of Sand"..."because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end." Upon opening it, he is startled to discover that the book, which is written in an unknown language and occasionally punctuated by illustrations, is, in fact, infinite: as one turns the pages, more pages seem to grow out of the front and back covers. He trades a month of his pension and a prized "Wiclif Bible" [1] for the book and hides it on a bookshelf behind his copy of One Thousand and One Nights . Over the summer, the narrator obsesses over the book, poring over it, cataloging its illustrations and refusing to go outside for fear of its theft. In the end, realizing that the book is monstrous, he briefly considers burning it before fearing the possibility of the endless supply of smoke suffocating the world. Instead, he goes to the National Library where he once worked (like Borges) to leave the book among the basement bookshelves, reasoning that "the best place to hide a leaf is in a forest."
The story (retitled The Sandbook) was turned into an experimental dance piece by Esther Linley's dance company for the 1994 Donaufestival in Austria. The soundtrack to the piece was written by German musician Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Roedelius also featured as an actor in the piece. [2]
The story was adapted by the Saudi filmmaker Bader Al-Homoud in his online film [3] and was selected as an official honoree in the 18th Annual Webby Awards in 2014. [4]
The Dutch composer Michel van der Aa created for the 2015 Holland Festival a digital interactive song cycle based on this story, with Kate Miller-Heidke as performer. [5]
The Oakland Theater Project staged an adaptation of the story in 2022, written by playwright Lisa Ramirez. [6]
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 books, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El 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.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events which has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly eventually occur, given unlimited time.
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentinian journal Sur, May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961.
"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set.
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"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
"The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" is a fantasy short story written in 1935 by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In his autobiographical essay, Borges wrote about "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", "it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based."
"The Killers" is a short story by Ernest Hemingway, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1927 and later republished in Men Without Women,Snows of Kilimanjaro, and The Nick Adams Stories. Set in 1920s Summit, Illinois, the story follows recurring Hemingway character Nick Adams as he has a run-in with a pair of hitmen, who are seeking to kill a boxer, in a local restaurant.
Ficciones is a collection of short stories by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges, originally written and published in Spanish between 1941 and 1956. Thirteen stories from Ficciones were first published by New Directions in the English-language anthology Labyrinths (1962). In the same year, Grove Press published the entirety of the book in English using the same title as in the original language. "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" originally appeared published in A History of Eternity (1936). Ficciones became Borges's most famous book and made him known worldwide.
Labyrinths is a collection of short stories and essays by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It was translated into English, published soon after Borges won the International Publishers' Prize with Samuel Beckett.
This is a bibliography of works by Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986).
"The Aleph" is a short story by the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. First published in September 1945, it was reprinted in the short story collection, The Aleph and Other Stories, in 1949, and revised by the author in 1974.
"The Garden of Forking Paths" is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is the title story in the collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (1941), which was republished in its entirety in Ficciones (Fictions) in 1944. It was the first of Borges's works to be translated into English by Anthony Boucher when it appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in August 1948.
"The House of Asterion" is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in 1947 in the literary magazine Los Anales de Buenos Aires and republished in Borges's short story collection The Aleph in 1949. It is based on the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur and is told from the perspective of Asterion, the Minotaur.
"Borges and I" is a short story by the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. It is one of the stories in the short story collection The Maker, first published in 1960.
The Book of Sand is a 1975 short story collection by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the author's opinion, the collection, written relatively late in his career — and while blind — is his best book. This opinion is not shared by most critics, many of whom prefer his other works such as those in Ficciones (1944).
Shakespeare's Memory is a short story collection published in 1983 that collects the last stories by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, which had been published in diverse mediums, such as the national newspapers La Nación and Clarín. It was published three years before the author's death.
"There Are More Things" is a short story written by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges in 1975. It was first published in the short story collection The Book of Sand, as the collection's fourth entry. The story tells of the encounter the narrator has with a monstrous entity inhabiting an equally monstrous house. It bears the dedication "In Memory of H. P. Lovecraft" and accordingly holds many parallels with Lovecraft's stories, employing similar plot devices. The title alludes to Hamlet's lines "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".
Jorge Luis Borges and mathematics concerns several modern mathematical concepts found in certain essays and short stories of Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), including concepts such as set theory, recursion, chaos theory, and infinite sequences, although Borges' strongest links to mathematics are through Georg Cantor's theory of infinite sets, outlined in "The Doctrine of Cycles". Some of Borges' most popular works such as "The Library of Babel", "The Garden of Forking Paths", "The Aleph", an allusion to Cantor's use of the Hebrew letter aleph to denote cardinality of transfinite sets, and "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim" illustrate his use of mathematics.
The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel is a popular mathematics book on Jorge Luis Borges and mathematics. It describes several mathematical concepts related to the short story "The Library of Babel", by Jorge Luis Borges. Written by mathematics professor William Goldbloom Bloch, and published in 2008 by the Oxford University Press, it received an honorable mention in the 2008 PROSE Awards.