A Library that stores reviews of unwritten books

One of the ways in which literary texts are capacious is their ability to contain, within themselves, imaginary books: books that the more literal-minded real world isn’t yet able to realise. Borges’s short fiction is teeming with them. In ‘The Library of Babel’, Borges imagines a library ‘composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries’. The library is ‘total’: it contains books composed of ‘all possible combinations’ of letters: ‘All that is able to be expressed, in every language. All.’ He gives us a sample:

The detailed history of the future … thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogues, a proof of the falsity of the true catalogue, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books

Imaginary books are a good read as they are uncluttered by the freight of nuance.