Collected Fictions
SynopsisPlot
From Jorge Luis Borges’s 1935 debut with The Universal History of Iniquity, through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display his talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language
Story
About this book
Collected Fictions gathers the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer whose work reshaped how fiction could behave on the page. The volume spans from his 1935 debut collection, A Universal History of Iniquity, through the landmark mid-century books Ficciones and The Aleph, and onward to his later writings. Borges worked in Buenos Aires for most of his life, and the city appears across these stories alongside invented libraries, desert labyrinths, and imaginary encyclopedias.
His stories tend to be short and densely constructed. Many read like essays or scholarly reports that turn out to be fiction, while others borrow the shape of detective tales, gaucho knife-fight legends, or theological arguments. Borges frequently built plots around paradoxes of time, infinity, mirrors, and identity. A single story might propose an encyclopedia that slowly overwrites the real world, or a library containing every possible book. These structural games are carried out in cool, precise prose rather than extravagant language.
This English-language edition, translated by Andrew Hurley, collects all of Borges's published fiction in one volume. The stories are arranged chronologically by their original Spanish publication, giving a clear view of how his methods developed across several decades of writing.
