Series - Miscellaneous Works by Jorge Luis Borges

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Language:	Spanish
Translated Into:	Miscellaneous Works by Jorge Luis Borges (English) Miscellaneous Works by Jorge Luis Borges (Portuguese)

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a gamebook, yet he speculated on the form before it actually existed. Borges enjoyed writing stories and fictional criticism dealing with books that never actually existed, and in two of his writings, he described interactive narratives.

Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain describes fictional author Herbert Quain's Abril marzo, a 13-chapter novel which is actually a three-part story containing two branch-points, thus having nine possible readings.

The better known El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan describes an ancient Chinese writer, Ts'ui Pên, who went into seclusion to write a book and to construct a maze. One of the story's twists is that the book and the maze are in fact the same item; Pên's novel, El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan, is a branching, maze-like narrative which only makes sense if read in the correct manner. Indeed, it is only in the correct manner of reading that Borges' descriptions fail to exactly describe the modern gamebook; while actual gamebooks include instructions on when and how to turn to another section of the text, the works Borges describes seem to rely entirely on the deductive powers of the reader to determine the correct order of reading.

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Ficciones
El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan

Short Stories

Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain
El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan

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