Angel Flores, the first to use the term "magical realism", set the beginning of the movement with this book.

[1] The stories (except Hombre de la esquina rosada) are fictionalised accounts of real criminals.

The sources are listed at the end of the book, but Borges makes many alterations in the retelling—arbitrary or otherwise—particularly to dates and names, so the accounts cannot be relied upon as historical.

Two English translations exist, the first from 1972 and the second from 1999 (part of a collected edition, published as a separate book in 2004).

The 1972 English edition (A Universal History of Infamy, ISBN 0-525-47546-X) was translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni.