I filched this from an old mainstay of the web, the Arts and Letters Daily ( http://www.aldaily.com/ http://www.aldaily.com/ ), and submitted it with the ALD bl

I filched this from an old mainstay of the web, the Arts and Letters Daily ( http://www.aldaily.com/ http://www.aldaily.com/ ), and submitted it with the ALD blurb that caught my attention: "Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages". It comes up midway through the piece: Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages. “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one,” he wrote in 1941, “the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes.” This is not complimentary, a backhand comes up next. The writer is critical of Borges, mostly on rather shaky grounds at the end, but he does offer a few worthwhile contributions.