Note. With this issue PMLA offers its readers two features that I hope will reappear periodically in its pages. As a refreshing alternative to the Editor's Column, which has graced the front section of PMLA since William Schaefer had his say there in the January 1975 number, you will find a Guest Column. The authors are Myra Jehlen of Rutgers University and Maureen Quilligan of the University of Pennsylvania. As the two recently retired members of the PMLA editorial board, they can jointly tender their private but expert perceptions of the workings of the journal. This issue also brings the first of what I anticipate will be occasional contributions by honorary fellows and honorary members of the MLA. I am deeply grateful to Carlos Fuentes for generously releasing to PMLA a piece that he calls “a story on the stories of Borges.” It is appropriate that one of our fellows should be honoring another of our fellows in the (in)imitable styles of both and in the process should evoke yet another fellow whom the MLA would surely have honored had he not predated the association by some four hundred years.

^* Both the Fuentes essay and this note were written before the death of Jorge Luis Borges on 14 June 1986. In an ironic twist of fate that the master himself might have invented, PMLA pays tribute to a writer who accomplished the impossible feat of remaining unique while leaving his indelible stamp on modern literature.