This remarkable book by one of the great writers of the twentieth century includes essays on a proposed universal language, a justification of suicide, a refutation of time, the nature of dreams, and the intricacies of linguistic forms. Borges comments on such literary figures as Pascal, Coleridge, Cervantes, Hawthorne, Whitman, Valéry, Wilde, Shaw, and Kafka. With extraordinary grace and erudition, he ranges in time, place, and subject from Omar Khayyam to Joseph Conrad, from ancient China to modern England, from world revolution to contemporary slang.

• Introduction
• The Wall and the Books
• Pascal's Sphere
• The Flower of Coleridge
• The Dream of Coleridge
• Time and J. W. Dunne
• The Creation and P. H. Gosse
• Dr. Américo Castro is Alarmed
• A Note on Carriego
• Our Poor Individualism
• Quevedo
• Partial Enchantments of the Quixote
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Note on Walt Whitman
• Valéry as a Symbol
• The Enigma of Edward FitzGerald
• About Oscar Wilde
• On Chesterton
• The First Wells
• The Biathanatos
• Pascal
• The Meeting in a Dream
• The Analytical Language of John Wilkins
• Kafka and his Precursors
• Avatars of the Tortoise
• On the Cult of Books
• The Nightingale of Keats
• The Mirror of the Enigmas
• Two Books
• A Comment on August 23, 1944
• About William Beckford's Vathek
• About The Purple Land
• From Someone to Nobody
• Forms of a Legend
• From Allegories to Novels
• The Innocence of Layamon
• For Bernard Shaw
• The Modesty of History
• New Refutation of Time
• Epilogue
• Index