His fiction received immediate critical acclaim in Argentina, even though he failed to win an important prize the year of the book's release. Outraged, other Argentinean writers and critics devoted an entire issue of the prominent literary journal, Sur, to Borges and his work.

As in his other stories, Borges uses fiction as a vehicle to explore philosophical and literary issues. Consequently, the characters in his stories seem less developed. In "The Garden of Forking Paths," he uses the genre of the detective story&mdah;a genre that requires clue-gathering and puzzle-solving&mdah;in order to explore the way time branches into an infinite number of futures.