Barth Meets Borges in the Funhouse

“It was about this time when I carne across the writings of the great Argentine Jorge Luis Borges, whose temper was so wedded to the short story form, that like Chekhov, he never wrote a novel, and whose unorthodox brilliance transformed the short story form. Writers Iearn from the experience of others, as well as from their experience of Iife in the world; it was the happy marriage of form and content in Borges’ s Ficciones-the way he regularly turned his narrative means into part of his message-that suggested how I might try to do something similar, in my way and with my materials”. (vii) 
John Barth – “The Literature of Exhaustion”