with her tales for one thousand and one nights in order to avoid putting her fate in his hands.

For Borges, the magic of infinity becomes illuminated on the six hundred and second night, ‘On that night, the king hears from the queen his own story. He hears the beginning of the story, which comprises all the others and also – monstrously – itself.’ Were the queen to persist in the telling of this story she would have to include a retelling of all the tales she had just told; she and the king would be trapped in an infinite literary paradox… As Borges describes in When Fiction Lives in Fiction: ‘The immobile king would forever listen to the truncated story of the Thousand and One Nights, now infiniteand circular….’ (much like Zeno’s famous paradox).

So what Borges sees in the Thousand and One Nights, much like the Quixote, is a book that contains itself within itself. The perturbing nature of this paradox is never more evident than in his story The Book of Sand where Borges lays out his depiction of an infinite book, or the book of books:

I opened it at random. … I was struck by an odd fact: the even-numbered page would carry the number 40,514, let us say, while the odd-numbered page that followed it would be 999. I turned the page; the next page bore an eight-digit number. It also bore a small illustration, like those one sees in dictionaries: an anchor drawn in pen and ink, as though by the