Alberto Manguel

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to …

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been …

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places is a book written by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi. It takes the form of a catalogue of fantasy lands, islands, cities, and other locations from world literature—"a Baedecker or traveller's guide...a nineteenth-century gazetteer" for mental travelling.

While traveling in Calgary, Alberto Manguel was struck by how the novel he was reading (Goethe's Elective Affinities) seemed to reflect the social chaos of the world in which he was living. An article in the daily paper would suddenly be illuminated by a passage in the novel; a long reflection would be prompted by a …

Alberto Manguel has enchanted hundreds of thousands of readers with his bestselling books, including The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Now he has assembled a personal collection of his own essays that will enchant anyone interested in reading, writing, or the world. Through personal stories and literary reflections, …

“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 StarWinner of the 2003 Prix du livre en …