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

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Copyright ©  by Robert Teeter (Copyright and disclaimer page)

First posted: December 26, 2004