This Companion to Jorge Luis Borges has been designed for keen readers of Borges whether they approach him in English or Spanish, within or outside a university context. It takes his stories and essays of the forties and fifties, especially Ficciones and El Aleph, to be his most significant works, and organizes its material in consequence. About two-thirds of the book analyses the stories of this period text by text. The early sections map Borges's intellectual trajectory up to the fifties in some detail, and up to his death more briefly. They aim to provide an account of the context which will allow the reader maximum access to the meaning and significance of his work. They provide a biographical narrative developed against the Argentine literary world in which Borges was a key player, the Argentine intellectual tradition in its historical context, and the Argentine and world politics to which his works respond in more or less obvious ways.

I have been reading Borges, and criticism on him, for many years, and have probably come to consider as my own those thoughts I absorbed early on from Ronald Christ, Dunham and Ivask's The Cardinal Points of Borges, Donald Shaw, the Cahiers de L’Herne collection, and others. On writing my Companion I have mined Edwin Williamson's Borges. A Life thoroughly for biographical information, and have not found space to acknowledge every last scrap I have used. Something similar goes for Evelyn Fishburn and Psiche Hughes's invaluable A Dictionary of Borges, which I have consulted over a much longer period. For many, Borges is already an integral part of their mental make-up, while others are just facing their first puzzlement and excitement at his stories; I hope to have provided extra focus or useful guidance for both groups.

I thank Stephen Hart as General Editor of Tamesis, and Ellie Ferguson as Managing Editor, for their graceful forbearance in nudging me into what has been a most rewarding and enjoyable project.