Infinite Books

A novel that runs backwards and splits: thirteen chapters, nine possible books, one railway platform at the end — or the beginning — of all of them.

Death keeps a library containing one book for every person who has ever lived or will live. Each writes itself, continuously, in real time, and stops mid-sentence.

The Book, without attributes — a myth the child remembers, of which every actual volume is a clumsy falsification, including the one Father leaves on the table.

A cloth-bound octavo bought from a Bible seller in Buenos Aires. It has infinite pages, none of which can ever be found twice.

Volume XI of a forty-volume encyclopaedia describing a planet that does not exist, in such completeness that the planet begins to.

An incoherent manuscript left by a Chinese governor who abandoned power to write a novel and build a labyrinth. His heirs found the novel unreadable and the labyrinth missing. They were the same object.

A novel that begins, breaks off, and is replaced by another novel that begins and breaks off — ten times — while the Reader tries to find a complete copy of the book in his hands.

A map of the Empire whose size was the size of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it — later abandoned to the sun and the winters, in the deserts, inhabited by animals and beggars.

An unfinished counter-novel whose notes tell you to read in any order, leave the important lines out, and treat the reader as an accomplice — which is, not coincidentally, the method of the book that contains them.

A blind man's scholarly account of a film in which a house is larger on the inside than the outside — a film for which no other evidence survives.

A copper-coloured book bound in silk, with two snakes swallowing each other on the cover, in which a lonely boy reads of a world that is dying for want of a name — and then writes one in.

An ocean whose waters are stories, polluted by a cult of silence, fed from a wellspring that must not be dammed — the library as a sea, which is the only form that can hold every tale at once.

A Sanskrit chronicle of Macondo, written in advance of the lives it records, which the last Aureliano finishes reading as the wind erases the town — and which is, at that moment, the novel in your hands.