From Borges’ bad politics: “If we now think of Latin American literature as central to the Spanish world, and of the Spanish world as a vitally renewed force in the world entire, it has a lot to do with Borges. As a 20th-­century master artist, he was celebrated even by 19th-­century standards—famous on the scale of Tennyson, Kipling, and Mark Twain…[but w]hen I encountered this idea of Borges’—that the whole world is, or should be, our country—I was wondering already if the idea, so attractive on the face of it to a displaced person like myself, was really quite right.”