Borges' Book Selections

The Argentinian fiction writer, essayist, and librarian Jorge Luis Borges selected the following titles for two series, "The Library of Babel" and "A Personal Library."

The Library of Babel

1. Jack London, The Concentric Deaths
2. Jorge Luis Borges, August 25 1983
3. Gustav Meyrink, Cardinal Napellus
4. Léon Bloy, Discourteous Tales
5. Giovanni Papini, The Escaping Mirror
6. Oscar Wilde, The Crime of Lord Arthur Savile
7. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, The Guest at the Last Banquet
8. Pedro de Alarcón, The Friend of Death
9. Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener
10. William Beckford, Vathek
11. H. G. Wells, The Door in the Wall
12. P'u Sung-Ling, The Tiger Guest
13. Arthur Machen, The Shining Pyramid
14. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Island of the Voices
15. G. K. Chesterton, The Eye of Apollo
16. Jacques Cazotte, The Devil in Love
17. Franz Kafka, The Vulture
18. Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter
19. Leopoldo Lugones, The Statue of Salt
20. Rudyard Kipling, The House of Desires
21. The Thousand and One Nights, according to Galland
22. The Thousand and One Nights, according to Burton
23. Henry James, The Friends of Friends
24. Voltaire, Micromegas
25. Charles H.Hinton, Scientific Romances
26. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Great Stone Face
27. Lord Dunsany, The Country of Yann
28. Saki, The Reticence of Lady Anne
29. Russian Tales
30. Argentine Tales
31. J. L. Borges & A. Bioy Casares, New Stories of Bustos Domecq
32. Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Dreams
33. Jorge Luis Borges, Borges A/Z

A Personal Library

1. Julio Cortázar, Stories
2. & 3. The Apocryphal Gospels
4. Franz Kafka, Amerika; Short Stories
5. G. K. Chesterton, The Blue Cross and Other Stories
6. & 7. Wilkie Collins, Moonstone
8. Maurice Maeterlink, The Intelligence of Flowers
9. Dino Buzzati, The Desert of the Tartars
10. Henrik Ibsen, Peer Gynt; Hedda Gabler
11. J. M. Eça de Queiroz, The Mandarin
12. Leopoldo Lugones, The Jesuit Empire
13. André Gide, The Counterfeiters
14. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine; The Invisible Man
15. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths
16. & 17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
18. E. Kasner & J. Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination
19. Eugene O'Neill, The Great God Brown; Strange Interlude; Mourning Becomes Electra
20. Ariwara no Narihara, Tales of Ise
21. Herman Melville, Benito Cereno; Billy Budd; Bartleby the Scrivener
22. Giovanni Papini, The Tragic Everyday; The Blind Pilot; Words and Blood
23. Arthur Machen, The Three Imposters
24. Fray Luis de León, tr., The Song of Songs
25. Fray Luis de León, An Explanation of the Book of Job
26. Joseph Conrad, The End of the Tether; Heart of Darkness
27. Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
28. Oscar Wilde, Essays and Dialogues
29. Henri Michaux, A Barbarian in Asia
30. Hermann Hesse, The Bead Game
31. Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive
32. Claudius Elianus, On the Nature of Animals
33. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
34. Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony
35. Marco Polo, Travels
36. Marcel Schwob, Imaginary Lives
37. George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra; Major Barbara; Candide
38. Francisco de Quevedo, Marcus Brutus; The Hour of All
39. Eden Phillpots, The Red Redmaynes
40. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
41. Gustav Meyrink, The Golem
42. Henry James, The Lesson of the Master; The Figure in the Carpet; The Private Life
43. & 44. Herodotus, The Nine Books of History
45. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
46. Rudyard Kipling, Tales
47. William Beckford, Vathek
48. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
49. Jean Cocteau, The Professional Secret and Other Texts
50. Thomas De Quincey, The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Other Stories
51. Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Prologue to the Work of Silverio Lanza
52. The Thousand and One Nights
53. Robert Louis Stevenson, New Arabian Nights; Markheim
54. Léon Bloy, Salvation for the Jews; The Blood of the Poor; In the Darkness
55. The Bhagavad-Gita; The Epic of Gilgamesh
56. Juan José Arreola, Fantastic Stories
57. David Garnett, Lady Into Fox; A Man in the Zoo; The Sailor's Return
58. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels
59. Paul Groussac, Literary Criticism
60. Manuel Mujica Láinez, The Idols
61. Juan Ruíz, The Book of Good Love
62. William Blake, Complete Poetry
63. Hugh Walpole, Above the Dark Circus
64. Ezequiel Martinez Estrada, Poetical Works
65. Edgar Allan Poe, Tales
66. Virgil, The Aeneid
67. Voltaire, Stories
68. J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time
69. Atilio Momigliano, An Essay on Orlando Furioso
70. & 71. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; The Study of Human Nature
72. Snorri Sturluson, Egil's Saga
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. J. Alexander Gunn, The Problem of Time

Source: Borges, Jorge Luis. Selected Non-Fictions. Ed. by Eliot Weinberger. New York: Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 500-501, 511-512, 547. © Maria Kodama, 1999

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