Reading Borges #1
A summer special — weekly sessions throughout July
If you’re tired of the endless churn of Substack Content™, here’s a chance to focus on what matters: reading strange, brilliant texts with like-minded people. The Reading Clinic, usually a monthly affair, goes weekly in July, with this special Borges series.
Join us to discuss Jorge Luis Borges’s The Garden of Branching Paths, as translated by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni.1 Meetings every Sunday, from 7pm to 8pm (London time) — attend one or all.
SESSION 1 – Sun 6 July: Introduction, Foreword, The Approach to al-Mu’tasim; secondary reading: Kafka and his Precursors2
SESSION 2 – Sun 13 July: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote
SESSION 3 – Sun 20 July: The Circular Ruins, The Lottery in Babylon, A Glimpse into the Work of Herbert Quain
SESSION 4 – Sun 27 July: Library of Babel, The Garden of Forking Paths
About the book: First published in 1941 as El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, these stories later became the first half of Ficciones (1944), Borges’s most famous book. El jardín… includes some of his most iconic stories, all blending fiction, philosophy, metaphysics, and literary games.
About the author: Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was an Argentine writer, poet, critic, and librarian. He remains one of the most important literary figures of 20th century literature, and is known for his use of paradox, infinity, mirrors, labyrinths, and imagined books.
About the translator: Norman Thomas di Giovanni (1933–2017) collaborated closely with Borges in the 1960s and 70s to produce English versions of his work. Borges approved of and co-edited these translations.
About the convenor (AKA yours truly): Fernando Sdrigotti is the author of Jolts, Shitstorm, We Are But Nothing, and A Foreign Country is the Past, among other works. He teaches language, and Latin American literature and cinema at Birkbeck, University of London. Born in Argentina, he now lives in London.