The Aleph - Jorge Luis Borges (Review)

Sorry for my particular sloppiness here. I was feeling kind of out of it and my mind couldn't quite handle describing the subject matter of the story.

[@vasiliosapocalypse1203]

Borges! The master. Indeed, quite a few of his stories have made my brain hurt. Great review-told as if someone just saw something insane and couldn’t wait to tell somebody. I really like his last two collections: Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory. Looking forward to O’Connor review. If you take recommendations might I suggest the short stories of Cortázar or Robert Louis Stevenson. Dostoevski's short stories I believe are criminally underrated. Russian short stories in general: Solzhenitsyn, Nabokov, Bunin. I don’t have to mention Chekhov. Pushkin. Kafka. Or the most famous short story collection Thousand and One Nights. Or if you want to stick with American you can’t go wrong with Melville. I hear William Gay’s short stories are excellent. Kahlil Gibran wrote beautiful short tales. Anyways, great review.

[@andrewbrough5403]

Yes! Perfect summary. Borges is one of the few writers who can cause such confusion. I haven't read his later collections yet so thanks for the recommendation. Flannery O'Connor is probably my favorite of the Southern Gothics, maybe even a league above Faulkner, IMO. I find Wise Blood to be such a incisive, compelling novel and Hazel Motes goes up with one of the biggest antiheroes since John Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost. I've read 'the Prophet' and the 'Broken Wings' by Gibran and would like to read more. While Dostoevsky remains one of the most hard-hitting novelists in literary history, his short stories have affected me greatly as well. "The Meek One" and "White Nights" being some examples. I'll have to check out Cortázar. The only Russian writer who's works didn't resonate with me was Maxim Gorky's Mother since I found it too on-the-nose, reductive and overly dramatic for my taste. Too many political lessons about class struggles haplessly touted by the characters. But Chekhov and Pushkin are great contenders too. Thanks for the recommendations again!