In the first book devoted to the impact made by Borges on the contemporary aesthetic imagination, Aizenberg brings together specially commissioned essays from international scholars in a variety of disciplines to provide a wide-ranging assessment of Borges's influence on the fiction, literary theory, and arts of our time.
Edna Aizenberg is Professor Emeritus of Hispanic Studies at Marymount Manhattan College in New York, where she chaired the Department of Spanish. She began her academic career at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas, and was a founder of the U.C.V’s School of Modern Languages. A world-renowned scholar of Borges, her book The Aleph Weaver, initiated the study of the Shoah, politics and “reality” in Borges’s work. Its Spanish translation, El tejedor del Aleph: biblia, kábala y judaísmo en Borges won the Fernando Jeno Prize. She published a second, expanded edition Borges, el tejedor del Aleph y otros ensayos in 1997, the essay collection, Borges and His Successors (University of Missouri Press), and Books and Bombs in Buenos Aires: Borges, Gerchunoff and Argentine-Jewish Literature. Her book, At the Edge of the Holocaust: The Shoah in Latin American Literature and Culture is forthcoming.