Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944)

Climb into the Library of Babel and you find hexagonal galleries repeating without end, their shelves holding every book the alphabet could ever spell, which means somewhere among them waits the true account of your death and a thousand convincing lies about it. This is the world Borges builds and dismantles across these stories: a man who remembers every leaf of every tree he has ever seen and is crushed beneath the weight of it, a forgotten writer who reproduces _Don Quixote_ word for word and somehow composes a richer book, a country dreamed up in an encyclopedia that begins to seep into the real one. Each runs only a few pages and holds an infinity. No one else made metaphysics read like an adventure or turned a footnote into a thrill. You finish a story dizzy, certain the universe is larger and stranger than it was an hour ago.