This is the New Yorker Fiction Podcast from the New Yorker magazine.

I'm Debra Treesman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

Each month we invite a writer to choose a story from the magazine's archives to read and discuss.

This month we're going to hear Ibn Hakkan al-Bukhari, dead in his labyrinth, by Jorge Luis Borges,

translated from the Spanish by Norman Thomas D. G. Ivani in collaboration with the author.

It was published in The New Yorker in April of 1970.

Wary of a world that lacked the dignity of danger.

The two friends set great value on these far reaches of Cornwall.

The story was chosen by Orhan Pomuk, who is the author of ten novels, including The Red Haired Woman and the Museum of Innocence.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2006.

Hi Orhan.

Hi Debra.

So the last time you were on this podcast, you read a piece by Vladimir Nabokov.

And this time you were quite sure that you wanted to read Borges.

So I'm wondering what Borges has meant for you in your reading and writing life.

Let me put it this way.

The greatest novels are toaster dostoyevsky, Proust and Thomas Mann.

Then the calvino, the Borges and Nobako comes for me.

The grades were the great masters of 19th century.

Fiction, great composers of big, moving, deep novels.

Especially Borges and calvino deconstructed what they achieved.

I like it when sometimes Borges says,

...