Seventeen stories, most of them only a few pages long, that contain infinite libraries, labyrinths of time, men who remember everything, worlds created by encyclopedias. Borges was a librarian in Buenos Aires going blind, and he invented a new kind of fiction: philosophical puzzles disguised as adventure tales, erudition as vertigo. The prose is calm and precise, which makes the metaphysical dizziness worse. Every writer who has played with ideas and narrative owes something to this book. The garden of forking paths, the lottery in Babylon, Pierre Menard: these have become part of how we think about fiction itself.