Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature

This sentence on Borges first appeared in an entry by Donald L. Shaw in the Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (1997). Shaw suggested that the 1940s, which saw the publication of Borges’ meticulous investigations of “the enigma of reality”, marked “the turning point in modern Spanish American fiction”.

This bulky volume is a concise version of the original encyclopedia, which won praise from the American Reference Book Annual and Reference Quarterly, and on this side of the Atlantic from the Times Literary Supplement and Reference Reviews. The concise edition retains survey articles on individual countries and entries on “topics”...