Jorge Luis Borges: How to Read the Master of the Short Story

By Lucía Moreno, Literary translator

Updated June 28, 2026 · Lucía Moreno

Jorge Luis Borges is the writer people are most afraid to start. The reputation says difficult, brainy, full of mirrors and infinity. Some of that is true. But here is the secret most lists skip: Borges is short. He almost never wrote a novel. His whole legend rests on stories you can read in fifteen minutes.

That makes him one of the best authors to read in Spanish, because you finish things. This guide shows you where to start, in what order, and whether to read him in English or Spanish at your level.

Who Was Jorge Luis Borges?

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 to 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, poet, and essayist from Buenos Aires. He is one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, and he did it almost entirely with short fiction. His stories turn ideas into puzzles: infinite libraries, a man dreamed into existence, a point in space that contains every other point.

He read in several languages from childhood. His father’s bookshelves shaped him more than any school. According to Britannica, his best-known books, Ficciones and El Aleph, appeared in the 1940s and made his name worldwide. The Poetry Foundation ranks him among the most important Spanish-language writers of his century.

Two facts shape how people read him. He slowly went blind, like his father before him, and by the late 1950s he could no longer read print. In 1955 he was made director of the Argentine National Library, so he ran a building full of books he could no longer see. He felt the irony keenly.

He also never won the Nobel Prize in Literature, one of the great snubs in literary history. He did win the Premio Cervantes in 1980, the highest honour in the Spanish-speaking literary world.

Why Is Borges Perfect for Reading in Spanish?

Because he is short, and because he finishes things. A Borges story runs six to fifteen pages. You can read one over a coffee, look up the words you missed, and read it again the next day with most of them already learned.

Compare that to a 400-page novel where you lose the thread by chapter three. Momentum is everything when you read in a second language, and Borges hands it to you. If you are brand new to reading in Spanish, our guide to the best Latin American novels is a gentler warm-up before you meet him.

One honest warning. Borges writes beautiful, formal, slightly old-fashioned Spanish packed with rare words. It is rewarding, but it is not beginner Spanish. The smart move is to read each story in English first, then go back to the Spanish once you already know what happens. You are removing the fear, so the language becomes the fun part.

Which Borges Story Should You Read First?

Start with one of these three. All of them sit in Ficciones (1944), and none is longer than a short bus ride.

Las ruinas circulares (The Circular Ruins)

A man arrives at a ruined temple with one goal: to dream another man into being, detail by detail, and send him into the world. The ending is one of the most quietly devastating in all of Borges. It is the perfect first story. Short, hypnotic, and you grasp the whole thing on a first read while still wanting to talk about it for an hour.

La biblioteca de Babel (The Library of Babel)

The universe is an endless library of identical rooms holding every possible book. Somewhere on its shelves is the book that explains everything, and a perfect catalogue of all the others. People spend their lives searching. It is the most famous Borges idea. It has inspired countless artists and coders, and it is genuinely thrilling.

El Sur (The South)

Borges said this was his favourite of his own stories. A man recovers from an illness, takes a train south across Argentina, and walks toward a fate that may or may not be a dream. It is the most human and most Argentine of his famous tales, and the easiest to follow on a first read. If the puzzle-stories feel cold to you, start here instead.

What Should You Read After the First Three Stories?

Once those have hooked you, move on to the heavier hitters. These are the stories that built the legend.

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

A made-up encyclopedia entry leads to a whole invented planet, with its own languages and physics, that slowly starts leaking into the real world. It is dense and brilliant, the story where Borges shows his full range. Read it third or fourth, because the opening pages are deliberately disorienting.

El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths)

A spy story wrapped around a riddle about a novel that is also a labyrinth of time, where every choice happens at once. It reads like a thriller and thinks like philosophy. This is the story that gave its name to his first great collection, published in 1941.

El Aleph (The Aleph)

The title story of his second landmark book, El Aleph (1949). In a dusty Buenos Aires basement, the narrator finds a single point that contains every point in the universe, all at once. The long passage where he tries to describe seeing everything is one of the high-water marks of modern fiction. Save it until you trust Borges to land the impossible. You can read it in the Penguin edition of The Aleph and Other Stories, also translated by Andrew Hurley.

Funes el memorioso (Funes, His Memory)

A young man falls from a horse and wakes up unable to forget anything, ever. He remembers every leaf of every tree on every day. Borges turns that gift into a quiet curse. A clean, moving story about memory and thought, and an easy one to follow.

Which English Translation Should You Choose?

Read Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley and published by Penguin in 1998. It gathers all of Borges’s short stories in one volume, in modern, readable English. It is the standard complete edition in print today.

There is also an older, much-loved Labyrinths (1962), with translations by several hands, and the classic Grove Press Ficciones, whose translators included Anthony Kerrigan and Alastair Reid. Those versions have real fans, and Borges himself worked closely with some of his early translators. For a first read, though, Hurley’s Collected Fictions is the simplest choice. It is complete, consistent, and easy to find.

Should You Read Borges in Spanish or English?

Do both, in this order. Read the story in English first so you enjoy it and understand it. Then read the same story in Spanish, with the English version still fresh in your mind. Because the stories are so short, this double read is realistic. You actually finish it, and you learn a wave of new vocabulary while you already know the plot.

Cheap Spanish editions of Ficciones and El Aleph are easy to find, and the two books together hold almost all his famous stories. For a longer view of the tradition he sits in, see our guide to the best Latin American novels.

What Is the Best Borges Reading Order?

Here is the full reading order at a glance. Start at number one and work your way down. The first four stories are all intermediate level, so you can read them back to back before hitting the advanced ones.

Where Should You Go After Borges?

Once you have a few Borges stories under your belt, the rest of the great Spanish-language tradition opens up. Read Julio Cortázar next, an Argentine like Borges and another master of the strange short story. Then move into the novels of the Latin American Boom. Our guide to the best Latin American novels maps the path.

Our where to start with García Márquez guide is the natural next author to meet. And if you want to explore even more voices, check our list of contemporary Spanish authors worth reading.

One quiet tip: read each Borges story twice in a row. The first read carries you through the puzzle. The second read, now that you know the ending, is where you see how perfectly every sentence was placed. He is the rare writer who is better the second time.

Want to read your first Borges story in Spanish this month? Start with our Latin American reading list if you want an easier first step.

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