Plot Summary
"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" is a fictional essay surveying the following works, written by fictional deceased Irish author Herbert Quain:
- 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 (à la The Waltz Invention)
- 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"
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