[It] is both a hoax and a pseudo-essay. It purports to be a review of a book published originally in Bombay three years earlier. I endowed its fake second edition with a real publisher, Victor Gollancz, and a preface by a real writer, Dorothy L. Sayers. But the author and the book are entirely my own invention. I gave the plot and details of some chapters – borrowing from Kipling and working in the twelfth-century Persian mystic Faridud-Din Attar – and then carefully pointed out its shortcomings. The story appeared the next year in a volume of my essays, Historia de la eternidad (A History of Eternity), buried at the back of the book together with an article on the ‘Art of Insult’. Those who read ‘The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim’ took it at face value, and one of my friends [Bioy Casares] even ordered a copy from London. It was not until 1942 that I openly published it as a short story in my first story collection, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan … it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based. (Aut 239–40)

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them. (F 5)