He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina (1899). After studying in Europe, he moved back to Argentina and got a job at a small municipal library, and eventually he worked his way up to director of the National Library of Buenos Aires. He was able to complete his library work in one hour every morning, and he spent the rest of the day wandering the stacks, reading, or writing.
Surrounded by books in that library, Borges began to write strange stories, often about imaginary books. He said, "It is a laborious madness ... the madness of composing vast books — setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them." One of his stories, "The Library of Babel," is about a man who works in a library that contains all the books that have ever been written, as well as all the books that could ever be written, as well as an infinite number of books filled with gibberish, and nobody knows which books are worth reading.
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