Collected Fictions

What Hacker News says

1. viccisNov 2025
   I'll add some recommendations to the author's list, as I have found that reading difficult literature (both fiction and non-fiction) has been like exercising a muscle for me. For example, I read Blood Meridian before doing this and then again after doing it for a few years, right after McCarthy passed away, and it was a night and day difference in how "difficult" the prose was.

   A few things I think fit into the "short little difficult books":

   Borges is not someone I consider too difficult, but many do for the same reason the author mentioned people finding Calvino to be difficult. His works require that you invest some curiosity into thinking about the scenarios in his fiction. He also plays with the nature of the narrative of the story in a sometimes postmodern way that is still accessible. None of his works are longer than 20 pages or so, so not a huge time investment. I would recommend buying the Penguin "Collected Fictions" edition. It contains a collection of books of stories, and I would recommend prioritizing reading the Fictions and The Aleph collections first. Some of his popular stories to start with would be "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", "The Lottery in Babylon", "The Library of Babel", and "The Immortal". If you want slightly more sentimental, "The Circular Ruins" is wonderful. If you want dryer, more satirical and postmodern, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is hilarious.

   If you want a book that plays with the basic structure of a "novel", Nabokov's Pale Fire is a great read and a good introduction into what the technique of an unreliable narrator can truly achieve. No matter how out-there you think your interpretation of it is, if you look into published literary analysis of it, the rabbit hole goes so much deeper than you might think.

   Gene Wolfe is highly regarded among science fiction fans, and for good reason. While he's best known for his Solar Cycle, a set of a dozen novels, I think that the best introduction to him can be found in his short stories. They might not seem difficult at first, but some of them, especially Seven American Nights, Forlesen, and the trio of stories in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, are similar to Pale Fire insofar as they are far more than they seem on the surface. They require some degree of scrutiny and interpretation from the reader. I wish I had read them before his bigger novels, as I found reading those novels was so much more rewarding after learning how to read Wolfe from his short stories. If you want to buy a few short story collections, there's going to be some unavoidable overlap, but I would recommend "The Best of Gene Wolfe" (for The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories, The Death of Dr. Island, Forlesen, Seven American Nights, Death of the Island Doctor), "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories" (Tracking Song, The Doctor of Death Island), and "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" for its three novellas.

   If you want something much more difficult, try J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. He was influenced by Burroughs (Naked Lunch would be another recommendation here if you can stomach the Beatnik depravity within) and wrote a novel that will challenge its reader in many ways. It's very interesting to go straight from this into Crash, which covers a lot of the same material in a less difficult structure. Baudrillard praised Crash with "After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation", but I would say The Atrocity Exhibition deserves this praise(?) just as much, even if it's much rougher around the edges. Certainly, the political stunt pulled using one of its sections (called Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan) belong more to the Situationists' games than Baudrillard's universe of simulation, but the stunt relies just as much on the hyperreal breakdown of signifiers as anything Baudrillard even pointed to.

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2. viccisMay 2025
   That's always my problem with these huge lists. I feel like any recommendation is so much more useful if it's accompanied by at least a bit of context about why it's being recommended. Whenever I ask for recommendations on reddit or elsewhere, I prefer 2 or 3 answers with information over one of the 20 item list dumps. This site does actually have some snippets of context, you just have to basically click on one (I guess at random) to get to them. Some categorization or other discovery feature might help greatly I think.

   Anyway, I will second the other reply's recommendation of Borges also with the caveat that he didn't write novels. His short stories are phenomenal. They are also a bit more philosophical than "mathematical", but some of them (like The Library of Babylon) deal a bit with the intersection of mathematical ideas (combinatorics and infinity in that one's case) with the way that playing with them would impact people and society.

   The best advice for reading him would be, assuming you are reading in English, to pick up Penguin's Collected Fictions edition, containing a good translation of a lot of his short stories (and poetry as well). Skip past the first collection of short stories ("A Universal History of Iniquity") as it's pretty good but not his best. Start with the collection called "Fictions". Its first story is Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which gives you a good taste of how he writes.

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3. viccisApr 2025
   If anyone here hasn't read Borges, I'd strongly recommend him. Pretty much everything he wrote was short, <20 pages, and so it's really easy to sit down and read one of his stories over a lunch break. The common recommendation would be to try out Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and see if you like it. If so, it's part of Labyrinths, which is (in my opinion) his best collection of short stories. The best edition in English is probably Penguin's Collected Fictions.

   Regarding the content of this interview:

   >If you compiled an enormous dataset of everything Borges read, and combined it with an exquisitely sensitive record of every sensory experience he ever had, could you create a Borges LLM?

   This is my Kantian way of thinking about epistemology, but I don't think that LLMs can create synthetic a priori knowledge. Such knowledge would be necessary to create Borges out of a world without Borges.

   In this interview, Simon's view feels much more like the way Hume viewed people as mechanical "bundles of sensations" rather than possessing a transcendent "self". This led to his philosophical skepticism, which was (and still is I guess) a philosophical dead end for a lot of people. I think such epistemological skepticism is accurate when applied to machines, at least until some way of creating synthetic a priori knowledge is established (Kant did so with categories for humans, what would the LLM version of this be?)

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4. seanfDec 2023
   Collected Fictions[0] is a wonderful group of Borges stories that includes the ones mentioned in this article.

   There are some amazing short story collections out there if you are the kind of reader that has a hard time staying with an entire novel. Ted Chiang has a couple[1][2] collections of stories that feel very Borges-like.

   [0] https://www.librarything.com/work/25106 [1] https://www.librarything.com/work/28008 [2] https://www.librarything.com/work/23195758

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5. crackedbassoonDec 2022
   I’ve listened to 130 audiobooks in 2022 so far. I think I’ll get one more in before the new year but it won’t make this list. Some stood out:

   Greek Mythology series by Steven Fry. Not literary adaptations nor scholarly treatises; just accessible, fun reads with enough accuracy and attention to detail for a layman like me.

   I’m working my way through Cormac McCarthy. This year I read Suttree and The Crossing, which are both excellent IMO.

   I discovered these beautifully written character observations: Matrix (Lauren Groff), Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan), and The Crimson Petal and the White (Michael Farber).

   Not exactly unknown in the fantasy genre, but Joe Abercrombie’s Age of Madness trilogy is great. I think Abercrombie is actually an awesome writer. For instance, he has this trick for composing his big action sequences almost entirely through POV vignettes from disposable characters, which I think is a remarkable idea that essentially fixes one of the commonest problems in fantasy (plot over characters).

   On Writing (Stephen King). I read a few writing guides this year and was by far freshest.

   Collected Fictions (Borges).

   Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler) is a classic in the same vein as One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

   Shadow Divers (Robert Kurson) is a true-life story about divers discovering and exploring a remarkable wreck. Read this by accident, turned out awesome.

   A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (George Saunders) was one of those times where I knew little about a topic going in but got swept up by the author’s eloquence and enthusiasm.

   I rediscovered Michael Moorcock’s Elric series thanks to new audiobook recordings. The Witcher but good.

   Second Place (Rachel Cusk) was a batshit boilerroom melodrama. My first Cusk, will read more.

   The first three books of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series are great, but particularly The Eyes of the Overworld, which I was surprised to find was hilarious.

   I reread some classic Philip K Dick, including Flow My Tears and Stigmata, and More than Human (Theodore Sturgeon).

   The first two books of The Dark Star trilogy by Marlon James are both huge things, but worth it for fans of super dark fantasy. The setting really works for me, as far too much of this genre is basically set in a hyper caricature of medieval Europe.

   Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle might be the best fantasy series for me. Tenahu might be one of my favourite books of all time.

   The first two books in Gene Wolfe’s Latro series are superb and perhaps just as good as his New Sun novels.

   Gateways to Abomination by Matthew Bartlett is a gross, super dark, and fun little horror collection.

   I read East of Eden for the first time.

   Here are some books that were enjoyable but had some problems for me:

   The Royal Game (Stephan Zweig) was a super interesting novella that just sort of stopped.

   The Elementals (Michael McDowell) was an awesome horror novella with a mostly excellent cast of characters and plot, whicho was almost totally let down by an unsavory trope that’s unforgivable in something written in 2014.

   The Blacktongue Thief (Christopher Beuhlman) is the first novel in a new grimdark series with some interesting variations on familiar tropes, although the characters were somewhat flat overall.

   Here are some books I read in previous years but have stuck in my head: Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny, Roadside Picnic, The Vegetarian, The House on Vesper Sands, My Name is Red, The Lathe or Heaven, The Gloaming, The Worst Journey in the World, The Fisherman, At Night All Blood is Black.

   Things I read this year I wouldn’t recommend: Lord Foul’s Bane (offensive, poor writing), The Cement Garden (tries to be shocking but is quite boring), Lapvona (major disappointment), Them: Adventures with Extremists (superficial), The Wrack (feels trivial post COVID).

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6. plantsDec 2021
   Some of my favorite fiction books and short story collections in no particular order:

   1) Collected Fictions by Borges

   2) The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka

   3) The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

   4) Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

   5) 9 Stories by J.D. Salinger

   6) 60 Stories by Donald Barthelme

   7) 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

   8) The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

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