Borges Publishes Ficciones

In 1944, the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges released Ficciones, an expanded volume that brought together two distinct groups of short prose under a single title. Three years earlier, in 1941, Borges had published his second fiction collection, El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan, or The Garden of Forking Paths, containing eight stories. To create Ficciones, he combined those earlier pieces with a new six-story section titled Artifices, or Artificios. The resulting compilation transformed the trajectory of Borges's literary career, ultimately becoming his most celebrated book and establishing his international reputation.

The architecture of Ficciones reflects Borges's method of assembly over several decades. The opening section preserves The Garden of Forking Paths, featuring narratives written between 1936 and 1941, including Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, The Library of Babel, and Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. One included text, The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim, had originally appeared even earlier, in his 1936 collection Historia de la eternidad, before Borges reprinted it in the 1941 book. Dedicated to Esther Zemborain de Torres Duggan, a writer and collaborator, the volume continued to grow. In 1956, Borges issued an expanded second edition that added three more stories to the Artifices section: The Sect of the Phoenix, The End, and The South.