The Book of Sand (short story collection)


The Book of Sand is a 1975 short story collection by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the author's opinion, the collection, written relatively late in his career—and while blind—is his best book. This opinion is not shared by most critics, many of whom prefer his other works such as those in Ficciones.
Referring to the collection, Borges said:
The first edition, published in Buenos Aires by Emecé, contained 181 pages. In Madrid it was edited that year by Ultramar.
Borges opts for an epilogue to this short story collection, different from the cases of his previous collections The Garden of Forking Paths and Artifices, which had a prologue. Regarding this, Borges begins The Book of Sand's epilogue by saying: "To prologue unread stories is an almost impossible work, as it demands the analysis of plots one should not anticipate. I prefer, thus, an epilogue."

Content

The book contains thirteen short stories :
Among this collection are: The Other, the first story of the collection, in which the protagonist encounters a younger version of himself, The Congress, on an utopic universal congress, There Are More Things, written in memory of H. P. Lovecraft, on an encounter with a monstrous extraterrestrial inhabiting an equally monstrous house, Undr, on the maximum poetic synthesis, The Sect of the Thirty, on an ancient manuscript that tells of the characteristics of a sect that equally venerated Jesus Christ and Judas Iscariot, A Weary Man's Utopia, The Disk, on a one-sided coin, and the titular work The Book of Sand, on a book with infinite pages.
Evaluating his work, Borges said: