"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is part of a short story collection, and that makes it a short story. Moreover, other modern authors of historical fiction, writing about those times, would have indulged in colorful stereotypes and romanticism (says the narrator) but in Menard's work there are "no gypsy goings-on or conquistadors or mystics or Philip IIs or autos da fé. The short story ends with the narrator's claim that Menard invented a whole new way to read, one where you deliberately imagine the text as written at a different time and by a different author, leading to radically different interpretations of the original text.