I don’t read a lot of literary fiction, this was Renata’s pick off her shelf, but I went in with low expectations for a guy who mostly reads Vinge and Hamilton and came out wanting to reread half of it immediately.
The premise across most of these stories is the same trick, dressed up different every time: Borges tells you about a book, a conspiracy, an author, a labyrinth, with total straight-faced confidence, footnotes and all, and it takes you a page or two to realize none of it’s real, he just wants you to believe it long enough to feel the vertigo. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is the one that got me best, a fake encyclopedia entry about a fake planet that slowly starts leaking into the real world, and by the end you’re not sure where the joke stops and the dread starts.
“The Library of Babel” is the one everybody talks about and it earns it, a library containing every possible book, meaning somewhere in its endless shelves is both the true account of your life and an infinite number of false ones, and you’ll never find either. I read that one twice back to back.
One thing worth flagging if you’re picking a translation: I grabbed a used copy with the Andrew Hurley translations and later found out di Giovanni’s older ones are supposed to read cleaner, closer to how Borges actually sounds in Spanish. Didn’t ruin it for me but I’d steer toward the older translation if you’ve got a choice, apparently it matters more here than with most translated fiction.
These aren’t stories you blow through. I read one, sometimes two, then put the book down and let it sit before the next one, which isn’t how I normally read anything. Took me three weeks for a book that’s maybe 170 pages, and I don’t regret a single slow page of it.