"This delightful book provides readers a key to more than one secret room of Borges's magical worlds."-Mahmoud Darwish

"Alberto Manguel is to reading what Casanova was to sex."-Scotland on Sunday

"His stories about Borges . . . [are] wrapped in luminous poetry."-The Toronto Star

Winner of the 2003 Prix du livre en Poitou-Charentes.

In 1964, in Buenos Aires, a blind writer in his sixties approached a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk and asked if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the world's finest literary minds; the boy was Alberto Manguel, who was later to become an internationally acclaimed author and bibliophile.

Manguel's reflections are part memoir, part biography, and all celebration of the living quality of literature. A moving portrait of an enigmatic genius, replete with deep insight into Borges and the writers he most admired.