Explore "The Garden of Forking Paths" by Jorges Luis Borges on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The eight pieces of this book do not require extraneous elucidation. The eighth piece, "The Garden of Forking Paths," is a detective story; its readers will assist at the execution, and all the preliminaries, of a crime, a crime whose purpose will not be unknown to them, but which they will not understand-it seems to me-until the last paragraph. The other pieces are fantasies. One of them, "The Babylon Lottery," is not entirely innocent of symbolism.
I am not the first author of the narrative titled "The Library of Babel"; those curious to know its history and its prehistory may interrogate a certain page of Number 59 of the journal Sur, which records the heterogeneous names of Leucippus and Lasswitz, of Lewis Carroll and Aristotle. In "The Circular Ruins" everything is unreal. In "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote," what is unreal is the destiny imposed upon himself by the protagonist. The list of writings I attribute to him is not too amusing but neither is it arbitrary; it constitutes a diagram of his mental history . . .