This “new narrative,” as it came to be called, would have been impossible without Borges’s tradition-breaking fiction.

Latino fiction after Borges (that is, after his landmark collections of stories of the 1940’s) was decidedly different in that it was no longer documentary in nature, turned its focus toward the inner workings of its fully individualized human characters, presented various interpretations of reality, expressed universal as well as regional and national themes, invited reader participation, and emphasized the importance of artistic-and frequently unconventional-presentation of the story, particularly with respect to narrative voice, language, structure (and the closely related element of time), and characterization.

Social message, also, was often more important to the writer than was narrative artistry. Description frequently ruled over action, environment over character, and types over individuals. Prior to Borges, and particularly between 19, Latino fiction was concerned chiefly with painting a realistic and detailed picture of external Latino reality.

The stories he published in his collections Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, particularly the former, not only gave Latino (and world) literature a body of remarkable stories but also opened the door to a whole new type of fiction that would be practiced by the likes of the above-mentioned Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and that, in the hands of these writers and others like them, would put Latino fiction on the world literary map in the 1960’s. Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) may be, quite simply, the single most important writer of short fiction in the history of Latino literature.

Jorge luis borges ficciones english