The unstable nature of perceived reality was doubtless a more startling premise when the story was published in 1944 than it is today. Borges suggests that we construct worlds not only as individuals, but collectively.

Today anyone with an internet connection can engage in the same activity. Fan fiction websites allow anyone to add chapters to Pride and Prejudice, invent a Second Life, engage in group hypertext fiction, or join a virtual community sharing one bizarre world view or another. Even before the internet, groups of people mentally emigrated from our world to that of Dungeons and Dragons, or joined cults, or embraced short-lived ideologies. It is so, Luigi Pirandello reassured us, if you think so.

The selections in Everything and Nothing handle ideas and belief systems like found objects to be rearranged into amusing new combinations that, like all great art, compel us to re-see, re-experience, and re-think.

In his introduction to Everything and Nothing, Donald A. Yates probably understates this story’s primary observation, as he writes that it is about “our own world being taken over by another,” (p. vii). Yates’ interpretation suggests that a fiction has replaced a reality. In fact, the story suggests that, just like Tlon, there is no factual reality about our own world to begin with, merely one construct that gives way inevitably to another. Human history, and its subcomponents like medical practice and economics, is not “one damned thing after another,” it is one damned paradigm after another.

Borges would have us realize that our theological understanding is constructed by theologians, while elsewhere specialists are working away at explaining the newest temporary version of unalterable psychological principles. In every American presidential election, voters seek to affirm or replace competing economic paradigms and cultural values systems. What world are we in, the one described by John Keynes or the one by Milton Freedman? Ralph Nader or John Bolton?

Borges knows how to play tricks at his own expense. In “Death and the Compass” an erudite detective, much like the Borges we know from his essays, prefers interesting theories to actual boring facts. His delight in cabalistic Hebrew numerology is exploited by a clever criminal, who lets the detective trap himself to be the fourth victim he had cleverly expected. Inspector Plod was right all along. The unsuspecting reader is treated to impressive detective work in the tradition of the mystery genre, yet the story end is utterly original.

“The Babylon Lottery” is also true to its genre, science fiction, and it also moves by its conclusion into the psychology of whole cultures, a recognition of randomness consistent with the chaos theory that would capture imaginations four decades after the story appeared. The fifth short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” is at heart a classic spy story even more attentive to the role of minor events in the path of nearly infinite possible outcomes. Borges ends the story with fatalism in a delicate balance with myriad possibilities, all real, none dominant.

The selection of essays in Everything and Nothing is less satisfying than the selection of fictions, perhaps in part because a small book needs brief selections. The three essays that are largely autobiographical reveal more of Borges’ sense of himself than actual facts of his life. “Borges and I,” “Nightmares,” and “Blindness” seem very very much like his stories, except that in some ways they offer less understanding of their real narrator than the stories offer of their fictive narrators. The remaining three essays attempt understandings of other people with more vigor than Borges applies to himself. In “The Wall and the Books,” “Kafka and His Precursors,” and “Everything and Nothing,” Borges’ erudition is always subordinated to his delight in the effervescence of ideas, the illusions of permanence, and the sheer unreliability of nearly everything except the perception of unreliability.

The selections in Everything and Nothing handle ideas and belief systems like found objects to be rearranged into amusing new combinations that, like all great art, compel us to re-see, re-experience, and re-think. This small collection reminds us of why Borges exercised such a deep and lasting influence on fiction writers.