Atlas

In this heterogeneous ATLAS, Jorge Luis Borges creates a personal geography out of prose, verse, dreams, and photos collected during the blind poet's journeys around the world. The artist's reflections and associations are triggered by such diverse places and events as streets in Buenos Aires or Mallorca, a balloon ride in California, a piazza in Rome, a monster in Iceland, even a brioche. Borges charts a voyage which, disparate and fragmented like the world it describes, is also transformed by his notion of time that is both collapsed and infinite. As in his other slim, unconventional masterpiece, DREAMTIGERS, Borges confounds traditional genres in this literary scrapbook. Part journal, part fantasy, part "found object," ATLAS proves again that art need not be only a representation of reality but an integral part of it.

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of this century, was horn in 1899 in Buenos Aires into an intellectual, middle-class family whose ancestors struggled for Argentine independence. He was educated in Geneva and traveled in Spain before returning to Buenos Aires, where his first works were published in 1923. Borges has received the highest literary honors from the U.S.A., Israel, Italy, Germany, Spain, Mexico, and France, among other countries and has been awarded countless honorary degrees from the world's most prestigious universities. At age 86, he proudly proclaims himself a poet, an anarchist, and a cosmopolitan.