In Adolfo Bioy Casares's diaristic portrait of his friendship with Jorge Luis Borges, the two titans of Latin American letters discuss their shared literary passions (including police procedurals, gothic novels, fantastic literature, and more); take down canonical authors such as Shakespeare and Joyce; and together, model the rollicking and joyous way a life in literature should be lived.
Jorge Luis Borges might be said to be the most significant Spanish-language writer since Cervantes, and Borges is an astonishing document of the life of this twentieth-century giant through the diaries of his friend, the fellow Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares.
Over the course of their remarkable, five-decade-long friendship, Bioy Casares kept meticulous record of their energetic discourse on everything from the philosophies of authorship to the virtues of detective plots to the inner workings of sentences and of people. Devotees of police procedurals, the gothic novel, gaucho literature, and fantastic literature, they perform a mesmerizing double act, wielding their razor wit to offer blistering critiques of canonical writers such as Goethe, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Joyce.
Bioy paints a portrait of Borges as not only a writer at the pinnacle of his craft, but also an omnivorous reader who delights in nothing more than applying his staggering erudition to the sheer, unadulterated joy of literature. Borges is literature at its most wondrous, its most scathing-is literature as life itself.

Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999) was born in Buenos Aires. In the early 1930s, he became involved with the influential magazine Sur, through which he met Jorge Luis Borges, who became his mentor, friend, and collaborator. In 1940, Bioy Casares published his breakthrough novella, The Invention of Morel (NYRB Classics), establishing his characteristic style of uncanny and unexpectedly harrowing humor-also on full display in later novels such as Asleep in the Sun (NYRB Classics). He was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 1990.
Valerie Miles is the editor of A Thousand Forests in One Acorn: An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction and, with Azar Nafisi, co-editor of That Other World: Nabokov and the Puzzle of Exile. She lives in Barcelona, Spain, where she teaches translation and creative writing at the Pompeu Fabra University.
Alberto Manguel is an anthologist, translator, and author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including With Borges, a memoir of Manguel's teenage job reading aloud to the older, nearly blind Jorge Luis Borges. Manguel was the director of the National Library of Argentina from 2016 to 2018.