6 Williamson’s chapters on Borges’s sudden world fame will be of special interest to those American readers who weren’t yet alive or reading in the mid-1960s. I was lucky enough to discover Borges as a kid, but only because I happened to find Labyrinths, an early English-language collection of his most famous stories, on my father’s bookshelves in 1974. I believed that the book was there only because of my parents’ unusually fine literary taste and discernment—which verily they do possess—but what I didn’t know was that by 1974 Labyrinths was also on tens of thousands of other U.S. homes’ shelves, that Borges had actually been a sensation on the order of Tolkien and Gibran among hip readers of the previous decade.