“The Circular Ruins” draws its title from chapter 4 of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Menard is assigned to study authorship, originality, and plagiarism. Borges notes how Menard attempts to go beyond the translation of Don Quixote by immersing himself into the text so deeply, he nearly recreates it by reciting each line of original seventeenth-century Spanish. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” is presented in the form of a literary critique of Pierre Menard, a fictional twentieth-century French scribe. The writer concludes his summary by paraphrasing Farid Ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of Birds to highlight that, just as the 30 birds in that poem are, themselves, what they seek Ali is the character of “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim.” The writer contends the second edition is inferior to the first despite selling far more copies in many languages.

In “The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” a writer reviews the second edition of a book written by Indian lawyer Mir Bahadur Ali. Borges studies the people and customs of the region, finding the Uqbar people do not use nouns in their language, and therefore, do not adhere to common sense reality. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” the first story in Part 1, “The Gardens of Forking Paths,” follows Borges and his friend Adolfo Casares as they search for the meaning of the word “Uqbar” in the Encyclopedia Britannica until they learn it is a country in Asia Minor. Ficciones is listed as one of Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century. Most of the stories are narrated in the first-person, which is often Borges himself. Divided into two parts, The Garden of Forking Paths and Artifices, Ficciones featured fourteen short stories in the first edition and seventeen in the second edition.

Written between 19, the English language translation was published in 1962, the same year as Labyrinths, an unrelated collection of Borges’s short stories.

Ficciones ( Fictions) is the most well-known collection of short stories written by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges.

Ficciones by jorge luis borges