Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

About this book

Here is a handsome edition of one of Borges' "ficciones," in a translation first published in Labyrinths in 1962. It's an important story in the Borges' canon, incorporating most of the author's philosophical and esthetic preoccupations in a typically brief compass. With great solemnity and a convincing array of scholarly detail (including annotated references to imaginary books and articles), Borges concocts a fable of an alternate world and its infiltration of our own. The reality of Tlön is idealist: material objects have no existence; language has no nouns; its principal discipline is psychology, since its inhabitants see the universe as nothing but a series of mental processes. A series of 24 illustrations accompanies the text. Their disturbing resemblances to our reality make them appropriate reflections of Borges's imaginative constructs.' —The Kingston Whig-Standard