Ficciones

A collection of short stories by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, published in 1944 in two parts, The Garden of Forking Paths (first issued in 1941) and Artifices, with three stories added in 1956. Many are written as reviews, reports or scholarly notes, and nearly all turn a philosophical idea into a world. In 'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' an invented planet whose people are Berkeleyan idealists starts to leak into reality. In 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' a modern writer produces chapters word for word identical to Cervantes, and the narrator insists they mean something different. 'The Library of Babel' imagines a universe made of every possible book, 'Funes the Memorious' a man who forgets nothing and so cannot think in general terms, and 'The Garden of Forking Paths' a novel in which every possible outcome happens. 'Death and the Compass' and 'The Secret Miracle' play with reasoning and time.

These stories are standard examples in philosophy classes on idealism, meaning, infinity, memory and possible worlds, and they show how much thinking a few pages of fiction can do.