""This volume was first published clothbound by New Directions in 1962; it was issued in an augmented edition as New Directions Paperbook 186 in 1964""--Title page verso

Fictions. Tl�n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius ; The garden of forking paths ; The lottery in Babylon ; Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote ; The circular ruins ; The library of Babel ; Funes the Memorious ; The shape of the sword ; Theme of the traitor and the hero ; Death and the compass ; The secret miracle ; Three versions of Judas ; The sect of the Phoenix ; The immortal ; The theologians ; Story of the warrior and the captive ; Emma Zunz ; The house of Asterion ; Deutsches Requiem ; Averroes' search ; The Zahir ; The waiting ; The god's script -- Essays. The Argentine writer and tradition ; The wall and the books ; The fearful sphere of Pascal ; Partial magic in the Quixote ; Val�ry as symbol ; Kafka and his precursors ; Avatars of the tortoise ; The mirror of enigmas ; A note on (toward) Bernard Shaw ; A new refutation of time -- Parables. Inferno, 1, 32 ; Paradiso, XXXI, 108 ; Ragnar�k ; Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote ; The witness ; A problem ; Borges and I ; Everything and nothing -- Elegy -- Chronology

Presented here are stories that are redolent with intelligence, a wealth of invention, and a tight, almost mathematically formal style that challenges with mysteries and paradoxes revealed only slowly after several readings