Kafka’s writing allows us intuitions and half-dreams but never total comprehension.

When you find yourself laid up in a sterile hospital room, which books do you want to have with you?

To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

The Geist map has a venerable ancestor that goes back four centuries and halfway around the world.

Alberto Manguel examines the rich symbology of the fist, a primal symbol of rebellion and grief, across cultures and history.

Airport security assures Alberto Manguel that he has been randomly picked.

Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering it, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme.

Alberto Manguel remembers a golden era in Canadian writing, comments on our current cultural climate and proposes a brighter future.

In order to discharge ourselves of certain problems, why not simply erase from our maps the sites of such nuisance?

"Authenticity is the essential quality of all travel literature, imaginary or real."

Prince Edward Island gothic.

"Sometimes, in politics or history, certain words, certain names are sufficient unto themselves: it is as if there were names that once pronounced require no further telling."

We insist The Devil whispers horrible things in our ear and inspires our worst deeds.

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is a film about community and the north.

The books we love become our cartography.

There are imaginary cities for scientists, vampires, lechers and even bad students—but what about writers?

The novelist can often better define reality than the historian.

Reading is a subversive activity and does not believe in the convention of borders.

Alberto Manguel compares his life in the French countryside to that of Cain, whom God despised for being a settled crop farmer, and whom he punished by forcing him to wander.

Alberto Manguel examines a modern-day book burning and asks: how is this still happening?

What does it mean to "be" yourself? The face reflected in the mirror is unrecognizable.

A reflection on the complex and often inexplicable process of bibliographic categorizations.

What can the Brothers Grimm teach us about the state of our economic system? Everything.

Alberto Manguel's column from Geist 93 about how the most important Turkish novelist of modern times took over fifty years to reach English-speaking audiences.

Faith seems to shiver when confronted by art.

There is no way to step back from the orgy of kisses without offending.

An appreciation of Dante's "Commedia."

Ruskin's readers have the power to know that there is indeed room for Alice at the Mad Hatter's table.

Must artists declare their moral integrity?

There’s something not quite right about the grid on which the game is played.

Dogged dedication grants a reader vicarious immortality.

Libraries are not only essential in educating the soul, but in forming the identity of a society.

Compared to today's vile heros, Ned Kelly-the Australian outlaw who wrote the angry, articulate Jerilderie letter in 1879-seems as innocent as an ogre-slaughtering hero of fairy tales.

European Jewish artisans on horseback in Argentina.

Dear George Szanto, I write in answer to your letter describing your difficulties in finding a publisher for your new novel.

I’ve now read Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? and I’m happy to say that I was right.

Six days before the Passover festival in Bethany, the sisters Martha and Mary gave a dinner in honour of Jesus who (the gospels tell us) had raised their brother from the dead. Martha worked in the kitchen while Mary sat herself down at the feet of their guest, to listen to his words. Overwhelmed by the many tasks to be done, Martha asked her sister to come and help her. “Martha, Martha,” said Jesus. “You fret and fuss about many things, but only one thing is necessary. The part Mary has chosen is the best, and it will not be taken from her.”

A French writer whose name I hadn’t heard before, Pierre Bayard, has written a book called Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? published by Éditions de Minuit in a collection aptly titled Paradoxe. A number of critics in France have writt

When a poet friend was found dead after two days because of the do not disturb sign he had hung outside his hotel room, Darwish swore never again to hang the sign or lock his door. “When death comes,” he said, “I want to be disturbed.”

Immediately after the New Year, both my daughters became victims of the First Great Snowfall of 1999.

The epic genre suffers from disregard. To the Iliad, our new century has preferred the Odyssey: the encumbered return of the warrior matters more to us than his laborious swordplay.

Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.

A writer whose work is among the most important contributions to the literature of the Holocaust is forgotten by almost all.

“I think of my public speeches as the shy man’s revenge.”

"A library is never finished, only abandoned." Alberto Manguel on incompletion, voluntary interruption and the pleasure of the day before.

Alberto Manguel reflects on art as a witness to the human desire to be infinite and eternal.

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?" —Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

For most artists, the learning of the craft never ceases, and no resulting work is fully achieved

He is one of the strangest crea

For reasons I can't make out, organizers of congresses and literary get-togethers throughout the world appear to have been inspired by a common theme: America. In Germany, in Spain, in France, in Holland, writers are being asked to talk about this faraway place that is either an overwhelming country or an underdeveloped continent.

There are two big trees in my garden under which, when friends are visiting, we sit and talk, sometimes during the day, but usually at night. Especially at night, when talk seems less inhibited, wider-ranging, strangely more stimulating.

Some years ago, Susan Crean amusingly suggested that nations might be defined or understood through their emblematic children’s books and according to whether the protagonist was male or female.

Cyril Connolly’s writings have been republished, as The Selected Works (Picador, 2002). I remember reading his work in my late adolescence and wondering how someone could write like that, in fragments and half-formed ideas, allowing his thoughts (and the reader’s) to go in a thousand directions at the same time, and yet lend his texts an overwhelming feeling of cohesiveness.

I'm always looking for the moment in which a character must stop to eat because, for me, the very mention of food humanizes a story.

After fol

One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.

Art museums and geographical exp

When I was in school in Argentina, Europe (our notion of Europe) was a vast and powerful conglomerate of culture and wisdom. From there, from across the Atlantic, came the history to which, magister dixit, we owed our existence; from there came the writers whose literature we read, the musicians whose music we listened to, the filmmakers whose films we watched.

How much does a photograph really capture the essence of a person?

I met Alejandra Pizarnik in Buenos Aires, in 1967, five years before her death. I had asked her to contribute to an anthology of texts that purported to continue an interrupted story begun in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “There was a man dwelt by a churchyard.” She agreed and wrote a haunting piece called “Los muertos y la lluvia,” “The dead and the rain.” The book was never published, but we became friends.

“Have patience” and “Tomorrow” are two inseparable locutions in the Portuguese tongue.

Science and the arts fulfil their functions to help us survive through the imagination.

In the world between here and there, what place does one call home?

"Since the beginning of time (the telling of which is also a story), we have known that words are dangerous creatures."

"There are people," Chateaubriand comments, "who, in the midst of the collapse of empires, visit fountains and gardens"

Many years ago my father-in-law, who had been a British prisoner of war in Japan, gave me a small pocket anthology, The Knapsack, edited by the undeservedly forgotten Herbert Read. The book (which I have since passed on to my daughter) had been put together for the Ministry of War to be given to its soldiers: its proclaimed intention was "to celebrate the genius of Mars." Surprisingly, however, the general tone of the anthology was above all elegiac.

A few years after Kafka’s death, Milena, the woman he had loved so dearly, was taken away by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Suddenly life seemed to have become its reverse: not death, which is a conclusion, but a mad and meaningless state of brutal suffering, brought on through no visible fault and serving no visible end. To attempt to survive this nightmare, a friend of Milena devised a method: she would resort to the books she had read, stored in her memory.

The craft of untruth has been perfected.