text: These are all short stories, some very short; that's what he wrote. I remember reading a number of these (the science fiction ones mostly) in translation years ago. Rereading them now in the context of all his other work was really very interesting. As a collection of all his fictions, some of the items are a bit repetitive; the variations on the "knife fight" theme for instance. But the range of his imagination is fascinating, particularly in his thoughts about reality vs imagination and layers of reality and identity: a lot of it presages the information-based world of today, which sometimes seems to have left hard reality behind.
  
  Perhaps the link to the internet is one reason Borges seems to have a bit of a following these days among technophiles. Is not the web exactly Borges' "Book of Sand" - a place that absorbs us with fascinating and unique pages of information, but when we turn to find them again, we never can? And how long will it be before an imagined "Orbis Tertius" engulfs entities such as the wikipedia we think we can rely on (one might suggest it's already happened - look up Tatooine, for instance...) What exactly is information when it's just a bunch of ones and zeros - everything's already been written in the "Library of Babel" after all!
  
  The other fascinating thread to me was the influence of Arabic and Muslim themes; I'd never caught that before, but this collection includes a number of stories with an Arab perspective. Perhaps this is a well-known part of Spanish heritage; in any case, it was certainly interesting getting to know Borges through this collection, from the knife fights to the Arabian courts to the Immortals - not everything was great, but enough great stuff to be really worth spending some time with
  