Jorge Luis Borges, the literary master of the fantastic, is widely acknowledged to be the greatest literary talent to ever come from South America. His stories are a collection of the wildest, most daring fantasies any writer has ever created. There are numerous literary allusions in his terse, tightly woven narrative which is blatently designed to stretch and to surpass all the intellectual and spiritual limits of the human, and non-human, imagination This kind of work is much appreciated in our age of unrelenting progress where anything seems possible and new, undreamed of ideas and inventions appear on an almost daily basis. Typically unconventional, Borges' work is almost exclusively short stories in a era where the novel is worshipped as a literary icon. Borges' works are predictably popular among the digital oriented type personality which has generated many quality web sites devoted to him and his work.
      I have prepared an excerpt from one of my favorite of his stories at excerpt from The Lottery of Babylon.
      The above image is the cover of Borges' collection of short stories and philological essays called Labyrinths.