Everything and Nothing

A pocket-sized Pearls edition of some of Borges’ best fictions and essays.

Everything and Nothing collects the best of Borges’ highly influential work―written in the 1930s and ‘40s―that foresaw the internet (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), quantum mechanics (“The Garden of Forking Paths”), and cloning (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”). David Foster Wallace described Borges as  “scalp-crinkling . . . Borges’ work is designed primarily as metaphysical arguments...to transcend individual consciousness.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1890-1982), Argentine poet, critic, and short-story writer, revolutionized modern literature. He was completely blind when appointed the head of Argentina’s National Library.

Donald A. Yates (1930–2017) was an American professor, writer, translator, and editor

James Irby is a translator and editor who specializes in modern Latin American Literature. He is a professor at Princeton University where he has taught Spanish and Portuguese Language, Spanish American Literature, Brazilian Literature, and comparative literature.

Eliot Weinberger’s books of literary essays include Karmic Traces, An Elemental Thing, The Ghosts of Birds, and Angels & Saints. His political writings are collected in What I Heard About Iraq and What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles. The author of a study of Chinese poetry translation, 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, he is a translator of the poetry of Bei Dao and the editor of The New Directions Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry. He was formerly the general editor of the series Calligrams: Writings from and on China and the literary editor of the Murty Classical Library of India. Among his many translations of Latin American poetry and prose are The Poems of Octavio Paz, Paz’s In Light of India, Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgiafor Death, and Jorge Luis Borges’ Seven Nights and Selected Non-Fictions. He has been publishing with New Directions since 1975.