Conditional Reality

Borges wrote many reviews of non-existent books. His point was that the writing of long books was a taxing and time consuming occupation. Why not pretend the book already exists, then write a review which encapsulates its essence? In a long career of extraordinary literary inventions, this conceit may be his most ingenious. It allowed him to explore dozens of subjects during his lifetime. This blog occasionally attempts a similar agenda: the distilling of long, hypothetical novels into compact short short stories. I imagine Borges reading these posts, at an internet station in the Universal Library, and nodding his approval.