Ficciones
A collection of his short stories in which Borges often uses the labyrinth as a literary device to expound his ideas on all aspects of human life and endeavor.
Stats for nerds
26recommend
41mentions
39people
2010–2026years
66% recommend27% neutral7% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Have you read El Aleph and Ficciones?
Have you read Libro del cielo y del infierno, and El libro de los seres imaginarios, and Cuentos breves y extraordinarios?
The poetry is also very, very worth it.
And there is a recording of Borges reading a selection of his own poems. (Of which do not miss, for example, "El Golem").
- I'm jumping across several short story collections:
- "Exhalation" by Ted Chiang - "Ficciones" by Borges - "I have no Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.
I'm also slowly plowing through "The Big Book of Science Fiction" edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer.
I love short speculative fiction. And the above are among my favorites.
- AI has made me enjoy reading more. I enjoy the opportunity to sit on the couch and embrace the slower cadence of the writing. Ive been reading Sci Fi lately but I really enjoy the story in “Napoleon A Life” (history has been something my education lacked this one is a really compelling story)
Might I suggest finding an author who you resonate with based on how the language is rings and not so much what the story tells. Poetry is good for this if you can get into it.
Or books where you can read a little thing and think about it for hours. Meditations by Marcus Arailius is a good one. The Prophet by Kahil Gibran is another good one. Ficciones By Borjes is another. These are books where a little bite can set you thinking for an hour breaking you out of the frantic flow of modern life.
- It's not "sci fi" but you should read Borges' short stories, particularly from Ficciones.
You may have already read his story The Library of Babel: https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content...
- Ficciones is full of mockings of intellectualism. I Particularly like the critique on the critical philosophical work of Menard's Quixote. Where Menard, the subject of the story, carefully writes parts of a novel that is word-for-word a copy of Cervante's Quixote, but shaped by Menard's intellectual efforts, one is to draw the opposite appreciations than from the one written by Cervantes.
His stories are such a strange read. The plot, the characters, the mentions, all feel almost secondary to the feeling they evoke.
- Impossible to pick one... best I can do is five-ish, all fiction:
The Odyssey; David Copperfield; Moby-Dick; Anna Karenina; Borges' short stories, in particular Ficciones & The Aleph
Related
El Aleph
3 recommend · 4
Collected Fictions
13 recommend · 18
Labyrinths
24 recommend · 26
Selected non-fictions
6 recommend · 7
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
15 recommend · 39
The Garden of Forking Paths
6 recommend · 15
The Prose Edda
2 recommend · 12
