“The seven texts that make up this book do not require much explanation. The seventh one – ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ – is a detective story; readers will witness both the execution and all the preparatory work of a crime that, in my opinion, they will not understand even if they know its purpose. The others are fantastic texts; one of them – ‘The Lottery of Babylon’ – is not so innocent in terms of symbolism. I am not the first writer to write a text on the Library of Babylon; its historical and prehistoric curiosities can be examined in the pages of the 59th issue of Sur, where names as diverse as Leucipo and Lasswitz, Lewis Carroll and Aristotle are mentioned. In ‘The Circular Ruins’ everything is unreal; in ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ the fate of the novel’s protagonist prevails. The literary list I attribute to him may not be overly entertaining, nor is it haphazard; it is a diagram of his mental history.”
He renewed the language of fiction more than anyone else.
J.M. Coetzee