Jorge Luis Borges went blind in his fifties, and the irony was perfect -- so perfect that he, the master of literary irony, appreciated it fully. In 1955, the Argentine government appointed him Director of the National Library, giving him access to 900,000 books at the precise moment his degenerative eye condition made it impossible to read them. "I speak of God's splendid irony," he wrote, "in granting me at once 800,000 books and darkness."

He had been born into books. His father's library in Buenos Aires -- English-language volumes, mostly, from which the young Jorge learned English before he fully commanded Spanish -- was the landscape of his childhood. He read Don Quixote first in English and was disappointed, later, by the original, which seemed to him a poor translation. This anecdote, possibly invented, perfectly captures the Borgesian universe: a place where copies precede originals, maps are larger than territories, and the reflection in the mirror is more real than the face.

Borges never wrote a novel. He wrote short stories, essays, poems, and reviews, and the boundaries between these forms, in his hands, became meaningless. "The Library of Babel" describes an infinite library containing every possible combination of letters -- every book that has been or could be written, including the refutation of every true book by an equally plausible false one. "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" recounts the gradual invasion of the real world by an encyclopedia describing a fictitious planet whose philosophy denies the existence of material reality. "The Garden of Forking Paths" anticipates, by half a century, the concept of branching narrative timelines that would later become central to quantum physics and hypertext fiction.

These stories, most of them only a few pages long, are not really stories at all. They are thought experiments, philosophical puzzles, metaphysical jokes told with deadpan erudition and an undertow of vertigo. Borges invented imaginary books, attributed real quotations to fictional authors, and reviewed nonexistent encyclopedias with the same scholarly rigor a professor might bring to an actual text. He blurred the line between fiction and criticism so thoroughly that the distinction has never fully recovered.

He was politically complicated -- he supported the Argentine military junta, a position that likely cost him the Nobel Prize and that he later, partially, recanted. He was personally shy, devoted to his mother (with whom he lived until her death at ninety-nine), and terrified of mirrors, which appear in his work as portals to nightmare.

He died in Geneva in 1986, at eighty-six, having spent his final decades dictating poems and stories to secretaries and visitors, constructing labyrinths of language in total darkness. The blindness, far from diminishing his work, seemed to purify it -- as though, stripped of the visible world, he could see more clearly the invisible architecture of thought, memory, and time that had always been his true subject.