The first 13 stories are taken from a previous collection, Ficciones, published in 1945, which was expanded in successive editions, and the remaining ten were published in a collection titled The Aleph, published in 1949, and also added to in later editions. All the stories were written and first published in Borges’s native Spanish in Argentine literary magazines between 19. Labyrinths consists of 23 ficciones, ten essays and eight ‘parables’. It is a scandal that, to this day, only a fraction of Borges’s output has been translated into English. Penguin went on to publish a flotilla of four or five other volumes by Borges, but none of them hold a candle to Labyrinths which is one of the most important volumes of short stories in English in the second half of the 20th century. In the course of a life dedicated to letters and (at times) to metaphysical perplexity…īorges wrote a surprising amount (some 70 books in Spanish) and yet he is principally known in the Anglo-Saxon world for just one work published 60 years ago, Labyrinths, a breath-taking collection of 40 mind-bending short stories, short essays, and ‘parables’, all of which reference, quote and play with a multitude of obscure and arcane texts and ideas derived from philosophy, theology and mysticism.
There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding.
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