Ficciones

I read these short stories when I was twelve, reread them countless times as an adult, and was forever changed. Entering these pages is like journeying through the looking glass, only to enter a labyrinth of mystery, secrets, and chance. It may seem like an outlier from the books above. Yet Borges was a pioneer in speculative fiction and one of a kind. One of the stories has been called the greatest ever written. Just saying.

The Argentine literary icon’s mode of magical realism is perhaps the most different from others, the one that stands most apart. Couched in history and intellectualism, many of his stories read at first as essays until they dart into some realm of the fantastical to make a startling point about identity, storytelling, or human existence. No writer uses the far reaches of the possible to make you think more than Borges.