Ficciones
Jorge Luis Borges (1944)
“The book that invented postmodern fiction, written by a blind librarian who believed the universe was a library with no exit.”
Short Summary
Seventeen short stories split into two parts — 'The Garden of Forking Paths' (1941) and 'Artifices' (1944) — that systematically dismantle the boundaries between fiction and reality, author and character, reader and text. Borges constructs impossible libraries, infinite labyrinths, a man who remembers everything, a spy whose murder becomes a coded message, and an author who rewrites Don Quixote word-for-word without copying it. Each story is a philosophical thought experiment disguised as narrative, and together they constitute the founding document of literary postmodernism.
Detailed Summary
Ficciones is not a conventional story collection but a series of intellectual demolitions. Borges, working as a municipal librarian in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s, invented a form of fiction that reads like philosophy, philosophy that reads like detective stories, and detective stories t...