1. Whose work was Borges critiquing when he
compared T. S. Eliot to Agatha Christie?
a. Eden Phillpotts
b. Ralph Waldo Emerson
c. Emanuel Swedenborg
2. When did Borges win the Nobel Prize for
Literature?
He never won
3. Title of the brief story by Borges in which a
character turns his suicide into a heroic death by entering into a knife fight knowing
he'll lose. "El Sur"
4. What city inspired Borges to write?
What binds
us isn't love but fear;
that must be why I love you so.
Buenos Aires
5. What Spanish poet inspired Borges to write a sonnet concluding with the following
lines?
You go down
and walk on sadly
Not recalling the verse you wrote:
And his epitaph the blood-red moon.
Francisco Gomez de Quevedo
6. The collaboration between Adolfo Bioy Casares
and Jorge Luis Borges is one of the most productive and lengthy in the history of
literature. What was their first work together?
a. drafting copy for a yogurt advertisement
b. writing a story together
c. writing tango lyrics
7. The book of short stories entitled Six
problems for Don Isidro Parodi was published in 1942 under the name of a fictitious
writer created by Borges and Casares. What was the name of the fictitious writer? H. Bustos Domecq
8. Borges liked to state that contemporary
literature would be inconceivable without which two U.S. writers.
a. Melville and
Faulkner
b. Poe and Whitman
c. Twain and Fitzgerald
9. What hobby kept Borges' mother busy?
a. playing piano
b. breeding canaries
c. collecting stamps
10. Along with Borges, what two other blind writers
also headed the Buenos Aires National Library?
Paul Groussac and Jose Marmol
11. How did Borges change the Sahara desert during
a trip to Egypt in 1984? He took a
handful of sand from one place to another a few steps away and said "I am a modifier
of the Sahara."
12. What sensationalist newspaper published Borges'
first story in 1933 under the pseudonym of Francisco Bustos? Critica
13. During his trip to Japan in 1984 Borges
followed the steps of what famous 18th-century pilgrim poet. Bashõ
14. What literary award did Borges share with
Beckett in 1961? The Formentor
Prize
15. "Not to admire __________ is one of the
many forms of stupidity."
a. John Stuart Mill
b. Voltaire
c. Rimbaud
16. In which Borges' story, titled in English, does
curiosity overcome fear forcing the character to keep his eyes wide open as he faces a
monstrous being?
"There Are More Things"
17. The name of the well-known U.S. magazine that
published Borges' only autobiographical essay.
The New Yorker
18. What city inspired Borges to pen the following
epithet: "Ugly, vulgar, strident. Rectangular and filthy city..."?
a. Miami
b. New Orleans
c. Barcelona
d. Geneva
19. While serving as editor of a small magazine,
Borges was the first to publish a Latin American writer who would become very famous. Who
was it?
a. Gabriel García
Márquez
a. José Donoso
b. Julio Cortázar
20. Which animal licked Borges' face and was thus
immortalized in one of his poems?
a. a cat
b. a dog
c. a tiger
Some Borges sites of interest:
The
Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies & Documentation
The
Garden of Forking Paths
Fiction
The