Authors Like Jorge Luis Borges

Edgar Allan Poe

American · “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Purloined Letter” (1844), “The Raven” (1845)

Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston and spent his short life moving between magazine jobs in Richmond, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. He married his cousin Virginia Clemm when she was thirteen; she died in 1847. His three stories about C. Auguste Dupin are usually counted as the first modern detective fiction.

Every book by Edgar Allan Poe →

G. K. Chesterton

British · The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), Orthodoxy (1908), The Innocence of Father Brown (1911)

Chesterton (1874–1936) was a London journalist, poet and Christian apologist who was received into the Catholic Church in 1922. The Man Who Was Thursday follows a poet turned policeman who infiltrates a council of anarchists, each named after a day of the week, and the Father Brown stories solve crimes through a priest's knowledge of sin. His journalism contains antisemitic passages that critics have long documented.

Franz Kafka

Czech (German-language) · The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926)

Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague, worked as an insurance lawyer and published little in his lifetime. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, and Brod published them instead. The Trial follows a bank clerk arrested for a crime no one will name.

Every book by Franz Kafka →

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Argentine · The Invention of Morel (1940), A Plan for Escape (1945), Asleep in the Sun (1973)

Bioy Casares (1914–1999) met Borges in 1932 and became his closest friend; under the shared pseudonym H. Bustos Domecq they wrote parody detective stories, beginning with Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi (1942). The Invention of Morel, about a fugitive on an island haunted by people who repeat the same week, carries a prologue by Borges. He won the Cervantes Prize in 1990.

Julio Cortázar

Argentine · Bestiary (1951), Cronopios and Famas (1962), Hopscotch (1963)

Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914 to Argentine parents, grew up near Buenos Aires and moved to Paris in 1951, where he lived until his death in 1984. Borges published his story “House Taken Over”, about a brother and sister driven from their house room by room, in a magazine he edited in the 1940s. Hopscotch can be read in more than one order.

Italo Calvino

Italian · Cosmicomics (1965), Invisible Cities (1972), If on a winter's night a traveller (1979)

Calvino (1923–1985) was born in Cuba to Italian parents, fought with the partisans in the Second World War and began as a realist before turning to fantasy and formal games. In Invisible Cities Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to Kublai Khan that may all be one city; If on a winter's night a traveller is a novel made of the openings of ten different novels.

Every book by Italo Calvino →

Umberto Eco

Italian · The Name of the Rose (1980), Foucault's Pendulum (1988)

Eco (1932–2016) was a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. The Name of the Rose is a murder mystery in a fourteenth-century abbey, investigated by the Franciscan William of Baskerville, and at its centre is a labyrinthine library guarded by a blind monk named Jorge of Burgos. It became one of the best-selling novels of its era.

Stanisław Lem

Polish · Solaris (1961), The Cyberiad (1965), A Perfect Vacuum (1971)

Lem (1921–2006) was born in Lwów, then in Poland, and became the best-known science-fiction writer of the Eastern bloc. Solaris follows scientists orbiting a planet whose ocean may be a mind; A Perfect Vacuum is a collection of reviews of imaginary books, opening with a review of itself.

Vladimir Nabokov

Russian-American · Speak, Memory (1951), Lolita (1955), Pale Fire (1962)

Nabokov (1899–1977), born in St Petersburg in the same year as Borges, left Russia after the revolution, wrote in Russian in Berlin and then in English in the United States. Pale Fire presents a 999-line poem by a dead American poet, with a foreword, commentary and index by a deluded editor who believes he is the exiled king of a northern country.

Every book by Vladimir Nabokov →

Roberto Bolaño

Chilean · Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996), The Savage Detectives (1998), 2666 (2004)

Bolaño (1953–2003) was born in Santiago, grew up partly in Mexico and spent his last years in Blanes, near Barcelona. Nazi Literature in the Americas is an invented encyclopedia of fascist writers, and 2666, published after his death, centres on the murders of women in a Mexican border city. Since 2009 friends have questioned parts of his own account of his life, including whether he was in Chile during the 1973 coup.