In 1964, in Buenos Aires, a blind writer in his sixties approached a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk and asked if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the world's finest literary minds; the boy was Alberto Manguel, who would become a prolific, internationally acclaimed novelist, essayist and editor. Manguel's reflections are part memoir, part biography and all celebration of the living quality of literature. This is a moving portrait of an enigmatic genius, replete with deep insight into Borges and the writers he most admired. Alberto Manguel is an internationally acclaimed anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist and editor, and is the author of several award-winning books including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires, became a Canadian citizen in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Author
Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written with Gianni Guadalupi in 1980) and A History of Reading (1996) The Library at Night (2007) and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey: A Biography (2008), and novels such as News From a Foreign Country Came (1991). Manguel believes in the central importance of the book in societies of the written word where, in recent times, the intellectual act has lost most of its prestige. Libraries (the reservoirs of collective memory) should be our essential symbol, not banks. Humans can be defined as reading animals, come into the world to decipher it and themselves.
