Ficciones

Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones is the cornerstone collection of twentieth century short fiction, gathering seventeen stories that helped invent what we now call magical realism, postmodernism, and the literary fantastic. Originally published in two parts in 1944 and 1956, the book includes The Garden of Forking Paths, in which a Chinese spy in WWI England discovers a labyrinth that is also a novel of branching time; The Library of Babel, where humanity inhabits an infinite hexagonal library containing every possible book; Funes the Memorious, about a Uruguayan boy whose perfect recall becomes a kind of paralysis; and Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which an invented encyclopedia begins to overwrite reality. Borges writes in compact, scholarly prose filled with false footnotes, fictitious authors, and recursive paradoxes, treating philosophy and theology as raw material for plot. The result is less a story collection than a private cosmology, an argument that fiction is the only honest way to describe a universe whose laws might themselves be a story.