Jorge Luis Borges: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1899 to 1986
Quick answer: Jorge Luis Borges wrote fiction disguised as book reviews, encyclopedia entries and footnotes. A craft guide to his fake documents, idea-plots and last-line reversals.
Quick facts
- Born: 24 August 1899, Buenos Aires
- Died: 14 June 1986, Geneva
- Wrote in: Spanish
- Known for: Ficciones, El Aleph, A Universal History of Infamy
- Signature move: The fake document: fiction wearing the clothes of scholarship
- Start with: The Garden of Forking Paths
Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel and never needed to. Between 1939 and 1953 he produced a few dozen stories, most under 4,000 words, and they rearranged what fiction could do. Many of them are disguised as something else: a review of a book that does not exist, an encyclopedia article, an obituary, a footnote to a lost manuscript. The reader accepts an impossible premise because it arrives in the voice of a reference shelf.
Treat this page as a workshop file. Borges is often called a philosopher who happened to write stories. On the page he is a technician with a small set of moves he used with unusual discipline, and every one of them is learnable.
What he actually does on the page
He borrows the authority of nonfiction. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940) opens with a mirror, a dinner, and a missing encyclopedia entry, and proceeds like a bibliographical investigation into a planet invented by a secret society. Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939) is a mock scholarly tribute to a writer whose great work was to rewrite Cervantes word for word. The dry tone does the persuading. Nobody argues with a footnote.
He treats an idea as a plot. The Library of Babel (1941) has no protagonist worth the name, only a premise, a universe that is a library of every possible book, followed to its logical and emotional ends. Funes the Memorious (1942) asks what perfect memory would do to a mind and answers with one bedridden young man. He narrates in summary where others would dramatise, then drops one exact physical detail, a knife, a yellow rose, a scar, so the abstraction bleeds. And he ends on a turn, often a reassignment of identity: The Shape of the Sword (1942), Theme of the Traitor and the Hero (1944), The South (1953).
The signature move
The Garden of Forking Paths (1941) is a spy story wrapped around a lecture on a labyrinthine Chinese novel. A German agent in wartime England must transmit the name of a town. He visits a sinologist who explains his ancestor's book, in which every possible outcome of every event occurs. The two threads look unrelated for most of the story. Then the murder that ends it turns out to be the message itself, and the whole metaphysical digression is revealed as the mechanism of the plot. Nothing is decorative. In Writory's rubric that fusion of concept and mechanism is what Originality & Voice out of 20 is trying to reward.
Stories to read first
Begin with these.
What to steal for your own stories
Drills, not rules.
What not to copy
The coolness. Borges rarely wrote women, children or ordinary domestic feeling, and the stories can read as chess problems. Erudite allusion becomes bluff very quickly in other hands. The essay-story only works if there is a real idea inside it; without one it is a costume.
Life at a glance
- 1899: Born in Buenos Aires into a bilingual household with an English grandmother.
- 1935: A Universal History of Infamy, rewritten lives of criminals that already blur fact and invention.
- 1939: Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, the first of the mature fictions.
- 1941: The Garden of Forking Paths, the collection later folded into Ficciones.
- 1944: Ficciones published.
- 1949: El Aleph published.
- 1955: Appointed director of the National Library of Argentina as his sight fails.
- 1986: Dies in Geneva.
What writers can take from this
- Find the nonfiction form your idea most resembles (a letter, a catalogue, a case note) and write the story in that form.
- Give your impossible premise one rule and never break it.
- Use proper nouns, dates and page numbers to make invention feel documented.
- Put the twist in the last sentence, but plant its evidence in the first paragraph.
- Keep it short. Most of his best stories run six to ten pages.
Try it yourself
Write an encyclopedia entry, 900 to 1,200 words, for a country, sect or invention that does not exist. Halfway through, let the entry's author notice that the thing described has begun to appear in their own city.
Questions
What is Jorge Luis Borges's best short story?
The Garden of Forking Paths and The Library of Babel are the ones most often taught, and The Aleph gives the second collection its name. Pierre Menard is the story other writers tend to love most.
Where should I start with Borges?
Ficciones (1944). If the philosophy feels heavy, begin with Emma Zunz or The South, the two stories closest to conventional plot, then return to Tlön.
Why is Borges important?
He showed that a story could be built from an idea rather than an event, and that the forms of scholarship could carry fiction. Calvino, Cortázar and a great deal of later speculative writing come straight out of that discovery.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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