Fernando Pessoa. 
 
Pantheon: 1991. First American edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Minor shelfwear along the edges of the jacket. Tanning on the edges of the boards and slight foxing along the edges. Tips of the boards are a little impressed. Translation by Alfred Mac Adam. 278 pages. Very good. 
 
John Hollander wrote that if Pessoa didn't exist, Borges would have invented him. Pessoa blended genres and created radically opposed authorial personas (which he coined 'heteronyms'). Grounded in the past of Portuguese culture, chronicling his contemporary Lisbon, he wrote like he was from the future. It's easy to see how he compares to other greats - Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov - and hard to overstate how unique his audacious imagination really was. This is his masterpiece. 
 
“I've always been an ironic dreamer, unfaithful to my inner promises. Like a complete outsider, a casual observer of whom I thought I was, I've always enjoyed watching my daydreams go down in defeat. I was never convinced of what I believed in. I filled my hands with sand, called it gold, and opened them up to let it slide through. Words were my only truth. When the right words were said, all was done; the rest was the sand that had always been.”