Collected Fictions
by Jorge Luis Borges · first published 1998
81% recommend19% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Complete Borges short stories in one Penguin volume, with brief, idea-rich pieces under about 20 pages that play with narrative in an accessible way. Suits readers who want short fiction over novels.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
For the first time in English,all of Jorge Luis Borges's fictions collected in a single volume.
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Looking for good books to read. Any recommendations? I liked these: Everything and More, David Foster Wallace Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell Antifragile, Nassim Taleb The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Rene Girard The Wu-Tang Manual, RZA Meditations,…
on “Ask HN: What are some good books?” ↗…this book covers everything from physics to biology to computing to art with a grand sort of theory of everything. There are few popular science books more densely packed with original ideas. Borges' collected fictions. There probably isn't much that needs to be said about this that hasn't already been said. Borges was a visionary. Proust. Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. Completely changed the way I think about sci-fi. Nick…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. Always a delight, the two prefaces for the collection written decades apart are a must read (Amazon Look Inside hasn't got it. Don't know why.).
on “What are you reading?” ↗If you're interested in reading it, you may as well just go for the whole collection of his amazing non-fictions: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/d...
on “Borges' 'The Garden of Forking Paths'. A Hypertext Novel?” ↗My current bedside reading is: Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges - http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/d... (NOT an affinity link, just the link). He was a genius. His writing is wonderful. As others have said his ideas…
on “A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges” ↗…Randomness, The Black Swan, Antifragile, The Bed of Procrustes) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Iron John by Robert Bly - Catch 22 by Joseph Heller - The Character of Physical Law by Richard P. Feynman - Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges - 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Pharmakon by Dale Pendell - The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss - Greek Mythology by Edith Hamilton - The Player's Handbook,…
on “Ask HN: What books fundamentally changed the way you think about the world?” ↗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…
on “Ask HN: What are some must read books?” ↗…drives him insane) and "The Lottery of Babylon" (about a town that uses a lottery to coordinate all activities). You can read all of Borges' short stories in English in one volume: http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/d... I really recommend it.
on “The Library of Babel as Seen from Within: Reproducing Borges’s Library Online” ↗Borges: Collected Fictions (https://www.amazon.com/Collected-Fictions-Jorge-Luis-Borges/...) IMO you won't really understand the nature and limitations of fiction until you've read JLB. His work won't change your life, as such,…
on “Ask HN: Books you wish you had read earlier?” ↗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…
on “Borges and AI” ↗…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,…
on “When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI” ↗…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…
on “Mathematical Fiction” ↗…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…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2022 and recommend for 2023” ↗Would recommend reading everything in Collected Fictions.
on “A Lecture on Johnson and Boswell by Jorge Luis Borges (1966)” ↗…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,…
on “Short Little Difficult Books” ↗