A Universal History of Infamy

He chose his nefarious ones to suit his own purposes -- an impossible collection of gangsters, wizards, slave-stealers, lady pirates, fanatics and cruel emperors, drawn mostly from those seats of evil, America and the East -- and he practices his style on them with an absolute vengeance behind the camouflage of ""facts"" and the tabloid format. What attracted him to his villains was the same thing that fascinated him in the observable local thugs -- the streetcorner men that they were, both sub-and super-human. 

At any rate Borges does not bother with pet tifogging biography (except to be droll) or with motives of any sort, but gets straight to the ambiguous equation of power, magic, and style. Here it is something to play with, even revel in (and di Giovanni's translation is equal to it) although a more serious side waits to be explored. Other borrowed stories -- a couple of marvelous, very short ones from Swedenborg -- are appended to suggest a subsequent drift from the baroque to the mysterious. A real entertainment and indispensable Borges.