An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain

Infobox short story |
name = An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain
title_orig = Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain
translator = Anthony Bonner
author = Jorge Luis Borges
country = flagicon|Argentina Argentina
language = Spanish
series =
genre = Fantasy, short story
published_in = "Ficciones"
publisher =
media_type = Print
pub_date = 1941
english_pub_date = 1962
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" (original Spanish title: "Examen de la obra de Herbert Quain") is a 1941 short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It was included in the anthology "Ficciones", part one ("The Garden of Forking Paths"). The title has also been translated as "A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain".

Plot summary

The "story" is simply a description of the literary works supposedly written between 1933 and 1939 by a deceased Irish author named Quain. The review of fictional books is a favorite device of Borges.

*"The God of the Labyrinth" (1933), a detective story in which the solution given is wrong, although this fact is not immediately obvious
*"April March" (1936), a novel with nine different beginnings, trifurcating backwards in time
*"The Secret Mirror", a play in which the first act is the work of one of the characters in the second act
*"Statements" (1939), eight stories which are deliberately calculated to disappoint the reader; "The Circular Ruins" is supposedly an extract from the third story, "The Rose of Yesterday"

The piece is amazingly similar in tone and method to Vladimir Nabokov's "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight", a full-length novel published in the same year, although the writers were then unaware of each others' existence.