Borges, among his many glittering literary facets, was a world-renowned speaker. Seven Nights collects seven lectures that were taped during the summer of 1977 in Buenos Aires. These were later pirated as records, only to be reclaimed by Borges who edited them for publication as a series in a Buenos Aires newspaper. Alastair Reid, one of the leading scholars of South American literature, states in his introduction: “The lectures are separate literary journeys that we could not take by ourselves. Borges is our Virgil; only he knows the way.”

In Seven Nights, Borges utilizes each subject as a vessel through which an outrageous claim gradually makes clairvoyant sense. The “Divine Comedy” is a true story; “Nightmares” are beautiful; “The Thousand and One Nights” will never be fully read; “Buddhism” defies understanding; “Poetry” exists only to remind us of perfection; “The Kabbalah” proves the existence of God in man; and “Blindness” is a gift.

Behind Borges’ playful wit lies an impressive erudition amassed, despite failing eyesight and eventual blindness, over a lifetime of study. “For Borges,” Reid continues, “literary experiences are just as visceral as ones experienced in reality. When he talks about books and writers, it is like talking about landscapes and journeys, so vivid has his reading been to him.” As William Gibson remarked, Borges “stretched basic paradigms as effortlessly, it seemed, as another gentleman might tip his hat and wink,” and this “accesible and entertaining” volume (Philadelphia Inquirer) shows Borges utterly at ease.

Roberto Bolaño’s ingenious preface to Seven Nights neatly fulfills Borges’ claim that criticism is simply a branch of imaginative literature.

“I could live under a table reading Borges.” –Roberto Bolaño

“This wonderful little book serves to remind us again that Jorge Luis Borges is one of the greatest literary miracles of all time.” —Publishers Weekly

“Listening, via the printed word, to these relaxed and yet highly explicit discourses, one realizes that never again will there be a mind and memory stocked just this way.” —John Updike, The New Yorker