Against Literature

The first thing a young Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–1999) learned in his conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) was to value writing that was deliberate, restrained, and clear. Bioy dates this revelation to sometime between 1931 and 1946, before he began the diary that would chronicle their friendship, a record that starts in May 1947 and ends in 1989, three years after Borges’ death. Long considered a cult object among Spanish-speaking readers, Borges — the title of this 700-page diary — is set to be released in English for the first time in October 2026 by NYRB Classics, in a translation by Valerie Miles. That first decisive conversation of Bioy and Borges possibly happened while they were walking in the countryside, perhaps even on the Bioy family’s estancia in Pardo, about 133 miles from the city of Buenos Aires, where they raised and sold cattle, and where the writer would spend long stretches of the summer.