“In a series of short, sly, ironic essays...[the authors] invert, deflate, and dismantle most of the aesthetic fads of our time....Domecq is a seedy literary journalist....a pompous, brainless critic of every art in sight. He is hilariously awful and a great creation.” The Atlantic Monthly “The real target of [the authors’] often uproarious gibes is modernism—or the part of it that zealously pursues theories of ‘pure’ form into Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. The result, which Domecq never perceives, is invariably monstrous: novels and poems that cannot be read, art that cannot be seen, architecture—freed from ‘the demands of responsibility’—that cannot be used....With donnish humor and unfailing intelligence, Chronicles of Bustos Domecq thrusts a rapier into such gargantuan posturing.” Time
Author
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, usually referred to as Jorge Luis Borges (Spanish pronunciation: [xoɾxe lwis boɾxes]), was an Argentine writer and poet born in Buenos Aires. In 1914, his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school and traveled to Spain. On his return to Argentina in 1921, Borges began publishing his poems and essays in Surrealist literary journals. He also worked as a librarian and public lecturer. Borges was fluent in several languages. He was a target of political persecution during the Peron regime, and supported the military juntas that overthrew it. Due to a hereditary condition, Borges became blind in his late fifties. In 1955, he was appointed director of the National Public Library (Biblioteca Nacional) and professor of Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In 1961, he came to international attention when he received the first International Publishers' Prize Prix Formentor. His work was translated and published widely in the United States and in Europe. He died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1986. J. M. Coetzee said of Borges: "He, more than anyone, renovated the language of fiction and thus opened the way to a remarkable generation of Spanish American novelists."
