The story takes the form of a scholarly article about a recently deceased novelist. The novelist's name, Pierre Menard, does not appear until the third sentence. The narrator of the article establishes credibility by citing literary ladies with unfamiliar names, then presents a catalogue of writings found among Menard's private papers. The narrator asserts that this list is more accurate than one published earlier by a Madame Henri Bachelier in a newspaper with Protestant leanings. The list encompasses an unusually wide range of interests, from love sonnets to Boolean logic. Many are esoteric and strange, such as an invective against the French poet Paul Valery which is really "the exact reverse of Menard's true opinion of Valery," and an article on the elimination of one of the pawns in the game of chess, wherein Menard "proposes, recommends, disputes, and ends by rejecting this innovation." These and...