Free Republic

Nothing is less material than money. . . . Money is abstract, I repeated, money is future time. It can be an evening in the suburbs, it can be the music of Brahms, it can be maps, it can be chess, it can be coffee, it can be the words of Epictetus teaching us to despise gold. Money is a Proteus more versatile than the one on the island of Pharos. —Jorge Luis Borges, “The Zahir” I fell in love with Jorge Luis Borges when I was a freshman in college. That year, full of hope and confusion, I left...

Mystery shrouds an old greeting card tucked away in a dog-eared copy of Plato’s Republic that belongs to Toronto’s Agincourt District Library. Handwritten in Spanish, the card is addressed from famed Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges and it appears to carry his signature and a cartoon doodle. Borges’ works, including short story collection Ficciones, are considered literary classics. He died in 1986. UPDATE: Close friend says signature is BorgesLibrarian Louis Choquette discovered the card while flipping through the pages of a battered Plato book, he wrote in a Feb. 15 post for the Agincourt District Libraries blog. “I’m still in...

Jorge Luis Borges visited Israel twice. The first trip came at the invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was in recognition of his philo-Semitism, and, in particular, his positive views on Israel. Borges had been active in Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to build an Argentine cultural center in Jerusalem. He also had been the first to write about Israel in the prestigious intellectual magazine Sur in 1958. In the 1970s, in an autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker, Borges stated:Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days...

For an author who died five years ago without any recognition in the English-reading world, Chilean Roberto Bolaño is the unlikely new superstar on the global literary scene as the translation of his last magnum opus has left critics searching for superlatives.The 900-page, five-part, inexplicably titled “2666″, originally in Spanish, was published in English in the US in November and instantly recognised as a contemporary classic - the New York Times hailed it as “a landmark in what’s possible for the novel”. The book is out in Britain this week and reviewers are ecstatic. The Times and the Guardian had...