The Aleph and Other Stories

A point in space that contains all other points — from which you can see, simultaneously and in perfect clarity, everything that exists in the universe. A lottery that determines every aspect of every human life, and has been running since before memory. A man who rewrites Don Quixote word for word and discovers that, produced by a different mind in a different century, it is a completely different book. A garden of forking paths that embodies every possible future simultaneously.

These are some of the ideas in The Aleph and Other Stories — the 1949 collection that made Borges famous and established him as the most important writer in world literature that most of the world had never heard of. There is no one else like Borges. His stories operate at the intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and adventure fiction, and they do so with a playfulness and a precision that make them immediately pleasurable even before their full implications have been absorbed.

One of the essential collections in world literature. If you have never read Borges, start here. If you have, return here — because these stories are inexhaustible. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.