Manuscript of “La lotería en Babilonia” (“The Lottery in Babylon”)

Jorge Luis Borges’s fantasy short story “La lotería en Babilonia” was first published in the Argentine literary magazine Sur in January 1941 before appearing in the collection El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths) later that year. This manuscript notebook contains the original draft of that text with the author’s extensive corrections. “La lotería en Babilonia” is illustrative of how Borges’s body of work profoundly influenced the genres of science fiction and magic realism. The story was heavily influenced by Franz Kafka and describes a fictional, all-encompassing municipal lottery system—an allegory for the limits of reason and rational thought. Borges—who lived through two world wars, six coups d’état, and three dictatorships—strove to keep his politics and his fiction separate. Despite claims of indifference, however, his work invites readers to examine politics at a fundamental level: What is liberty? What is the role of the state?