Norman Thomas di Giovanni: "The Borges I knew and worked with - the one still fresh in my memory these twenty years since his death, the one I search for in his myriad biographies and cannot find - the everyday Borges, existed in a rarefied atmosphere. Protected and spoiled by his family, he never had to seek a job until he was close to forty. He always lived at home, and even at seventy-one, when he walked out on a disastrous marriage, he went back to his mother. Borges's inner life was lived in books, in philosophical quandaries, in thinking."Here are definitive translations of the earliest and most celebrated stories of Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the set of eight originally brought together in 1941/1942 under the title El jardn de senderos que se bifurcan or The Garden of Branching Paths.