Since it was first published by New Directions in 1962, Labyrinths has transformed and enriched our collective imaginations, introduced new possibilities for literature, and astonished generation after generation of readers and writers. This groundbreaking collection of stories, essays, and parables still serves as a perfect introduction to Borges’s imaginative universe: writing that is multi-layered, paradoxical, recursive, elusive, and allusive; characteristics which, in other writers, are often labeled Borgesian.

For many readers in the past decades, including Pope Francis and Daniel Radcliffe, Umberto Eco and Ursula K. Le Guin, the stories contained in Labyrinths—“The Garden of Forking Paths,” “The Lottery in Babylon,” and “The Library of Babel”—introduced not only a monumental writer but a new way of thinking about literature and the modern world.