The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the whirlwind of Borges's genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal's abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything else in between. Part One: The Garden of Forking Paths Prologue Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim (1936, not included in the 1941 edition) Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) The Circular Ruins (1940) The Lottery in Babylon (1941) An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain (1941) The Library of Babel (1941) The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) Part Two: Artifices Prologue Funes the Memorious (1942) The Form of the Sword (1942) Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944) Death and the Compass (1942) The Secret Miracle (1943) Three Versions of Judas (1944) The End (1953, 2nd edition only) The Sect of the Phoenix (1952, 2nd edition only) The South (1953, 2nd edition only)
Publication Year: 1994
I finally made it to part two and I genuinely cannot tell if this book is putting me in a slump or not. This is the longest I've ever taken to read a novella and I've still got only a little less than 100 pages to go... it's not even that it's bad or that I'm not liking it, it's very interesting, there's just something about it that makes it so that I have to re-read every page at least three times before I can confidently flip to the next page
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0 0I absolutely loved this book. I'd read "Garden of Forking Paths" in an undergraduate English class, and I hadn't been that impressed. Clever, sure, but not mind-blowing.
Turns out that "Garden of Forking Paths" was just not one of his better stories. Other stories that appear in this volume, notably, "The Lottery in Babylon", "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote", and "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" are among the best pieces of short fiction I've ever read.
I'm on-board with Borges now. I'll continually list him among my favorite authors. You can count me among those who think he was robbed of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Read him if you haven't.
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