Towards the end of 2013, the lovely Adrian Turpin, Director of the Wigtown Book Festival, approached me about working with a Scottish writer to create a play about bookshops. A few months later, I got a phone call from Adrian. 'Have you read "The Library of Babel"?' he asked. Turns out much of Borges' personal effects were donated to the Special Collections Department of the library at the University of Virginia, my alma mater (including this incredible drawing by Borges, here), and he had lectured at the university, so any English major was bound to have been fairly well immersed in his work. As with Shakespeare: The Puppet Show, the coincidences ran throughout this amazing experience: my director, Jessica Fox, ended up seated at a dinner in Garlieston, Scotland, next to Alistair Reid, the Scottish poet and dear friend and esteemed translator of Borges. Thus began my incredible, magical, and far-too-short friendship with Alistair, who sat with me for hours over the the course of a few gorgeous, midge-free Scotland summer days and talked about Borges, reality, mirrors, death, poetry, perspective, labyrinths and stories about his days, unconnected with Borges but utterly fascinating, at The New Yorker. The story I was writing became as much about Alistair and Borges' relationships with his translators and with his impending blindness as it was about La Ciudad, his neighborhood bookshop, or his short stories. And it became, ultimately and perhaps inevitably, about me, about all of us, about irony, and about the ultimate irony, that to know life is to know that it must end in death. And that that must be okay.