Everything and nothing

Celebrating the centennial of his birth, Everything and Nothing compiles the most anthologized and widely read fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, "a giant of world literature" (John Updike, The New Yorker). Some of the narrative pieces herein contained are: "Pierre Menard" in which a modern writer reconstructs passages from Don Quixote that are verbally identical but read differently; "The Garden of Forking Paths," an intellectual variation on the detective-story genre; and "Nightmares," a lecture which, as Alastair Reid puts it, "shifts from personal memories to writers, to an examination of other peoples' metaphors, to language itself." Everything and Nothing serves as a perfect introduction to Borges's genius.