Reading Order
Ficciones Reading Order
Ficciones (1944) by Jorge Luis Borges is the single most influential short story collection of the twentieth century — seventeen stories (in two parts, 'The Garden of Forking Paths' and 'Artifices') that redefined what short prose fiction could do, anticipated the techniques of postmodernism by decades, and have influenced writers from Umberto Eco and John Barth to Salman Rushdie, Paul Auster, and W.G. Sebald. Borges's method is unique: his stories are typically presented as reviews of, prefaces to, or commentaries on fictitious books, or as reconstructions of impossible philosophical problems, or as detective stories whose solutions dissolve the genre conventions that produced them. The physical world in Borges is always about to be revealed as a text, a dream, a game, or a library. Borges's great themes are a set of interconnected philosophical obsessions: infinity (the Library of Babel, which contains all possible books; the Aleph, which contains all space at once; the map that is as large as the territory); time (circular time, forking time, the eternally recurring moment, the man who remembers everything); identity (the author and his character, the translator and the original, the copy and the original); and the nature of fiction itself (the story that contains itself, the fiction that becomes real, the real that turns out to be fictional). These themes are not presented as abstract arguments but as stories — concentrated, precise, often darkly comic, always building to an ending that reframes everything that preceded it. Borges is the writer who gave the twentieth century the concept of the labyrinth as a figure for all intellectual experience, and the Aleph as a figure for all experience at once.
Where to start
Ficciones — the Andrew Hurley translation in the Collected Fictions (Penguin) is the most complete modern translation. Start with 'The Garden of Forking Paths,' 'The Library of Babel,' 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,' 'The Lottery in Babylon,' and 'Death and the Compass.'
Complete Ficciones Book List
- 1Buy
Collected Fictions (trans. Andrew Hurley)
Jorge Luis Borges·1998·Hurley's complete Penguin translation — the best modern English version; contains Ficciones and The Aleph together. - 2Buy
Labyrinths
Jorge Luis Borges·1962·The earlier English-language selection — the classic American introduction to Borges; contains most of the essential stories though not all. - 3Buy
The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco·1980·Eco's medieval detective novel — the most successful novel-length development of Borgesian themes; the library as labyrinth, the detective investigation that questions its own foundations. - 4Buy
If on a winter's night a traveler
Italo Calvino·1979·Calvino's metafictional novel — the most explicitly Borgesian novel in Italian; fiction about the experience of reading fiction. - 5Buy
City of Glass
Paul Auster·1985·Auster's New York Trilogy — the Borgesian detective story in an American urban setting; the investigation that dissolves the investigator. - 6Buy
House of Leaves
Mark Z. Danielewski·2000·Danielewski's labyrinthine novel — a house whose interior is larger than its exterior; the Borgesian infinite library transformed into American horror. - 7Buy
Hopscotch
Julio Cortázar·1963·Cortázar's novel that can be read in multiple orders — the Borgesian forking text in novel form; Borges's companion in the Latin American literary Boom. - 8Buy
The Buried Giant
Kazuo Ishiguro·2015·Ishiguro's Arthurian fantasy — memory as labyrinth, the forgotten past that returns; the Borgesian themes of time and forgetting in a British literary context.
Ficciones — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Ficciones about?
Ficciones is a collection of seventeen stories divided into two sections: 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941) and 'Artifices' (1944). The stories are not conventional narratives with characters and plots — they are philosophical thought experiments disguised as fiction: a man who rewrites Don Quixote word for word and creates a different book (Pierre Menard); an infinite library that contains all possible books (The Library of Babel); a lottery that eventually controls every aspect of Babylonian life (The Lottery in Babylon); a detective story whose solution reveals the impossibility of justice (Death and the Compass); a time-traveling story that reveals time as a garden of forking paths rather than a single thread. Each story is very short (rarely more than ten pages), very concentrated, and ends with an image or idea that reframes everything that preceded it.
What is 'The Garden of Forking Paths'?
'The Garden of Forking Paths' is the first and most famous story in Ficciones — a spy story set during World War I in England. A Chinese-German spy named Yu Tsun has a mission to communicate the name of a British artillery park to the Germans but is being hunted by a British agent. He kills a man named Stephen Albert to use Albert's name as a code in a newspaper report. Albert turns out to be a scholar of Chinese literature who has been studying a labyrinthine novel by Yu Tsun's ancestor — a novel that, Albert explains, is structured not as a single narrative but as a branching set of all possible narratives, in which every moment forks into multiple futures, and time is not a line but a network of diverging and converging paths. The story is simultaneously a tight spy thriller and a philosophical meditation on time, free will, and the nature of narrative.
What is 'The Library of Babel'?
'The Library of Babel' presents the universe as an infinite library of hexagonal rooms, each containing 410 books of 410 pages each, containing every possible combination of 25 characters. If the library is infinite and contains every possible book, it contains the complete and true account of the future, accurate maps of the universe, every possible argument, every possible refutation. But because it also contains an infinite number of false books, misleading maps, and contradictory accounts, it is useless as a source of knowledge. The narrator has been in the library his entire life, as have all humans, who have never found the exit and have developed religions around the library's hypothetical 'catalog of all catalogs.' The story is Borges's image of the human condition — infinite information, but no reliable way to identify what is true within it.
Who is Pierre Menard and what is his significance?
'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' presents a fictional essay reviewing the work of a fictional French symbolist poet named Pierre Menard, whose greatest achievement was rewriting chapters of Don Quixote word for word. Menard did not copy Cervantes — he wrote the same words independently, as a contemporary author, and produced a text that, while identical in every character and word, is richer and more complex than Cervantes's original, because it was written in the twentieth century with a full knowledge of the literary tradition between Cervantes and Menard. The story is Borges's argument about the irreducibility of context in reading: the same words mean something different depending on who wrote them, when, and in what context. It anticipates the critical theory of the 1970s (particularly Roland Barthes's 'The Death of the Author') by three decades.
What should I read after Ficciones?
After Ficciones, Borges's own The Aleph (1949) — another story collection, containing the title story about a point in space from which all space is visible — is the natural continuation; and The Book of Imaginary Beings (1967) and Other Inquisitions (1952) show Borges's range beyond fiction. For the Borgesian tradition in fiction, Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy are the most important developments. For understanding Borges's philosophical sources, his essays in Other Inquisitions engage with Schopenhauer, Berkeley, Hume, and other philosophers whose ideas appear transformed in the fiction.
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