"The Circular Ruins" (original Spanish title: "Las ruinas circulares") is a short story by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. First published in the literary journal Sur in December 1940, it was included in the 1941 collection The Garden of Forking Paths. The short story deals with themes that recur in Borges's work: idealism, the manifestation of thoughts in the "real world", meaningful dreams, and immortality. The manifestation of thoughts as objects in the real world was a theme in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", but here Borges takes it to another level: the manifestation of human beings rather than simple objects. The story also seems to symbolize writers as creators who engender one another and whose existence and originality would be impossible without their predecessors, a theme he wrote about in other works such as "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", another short story from the Ficciones collection. Its treatment of dreaming reality and free will is similar to La vida es sueño, a Spanish play published in 1635 by Pedro Calderón de la Barca.