A Short Stay in Hell is a brilliant retelling of Borges’ short story ‘The Library of Babel’, in which Steven L. Peck imagines the afterlife as a near infinite library of books containing every possible combination of letters and punctuation. To escape you need to find the book which contains the story of your life. Perhaps less poetic than Borges’ library, whose books contain beautiful found poems (‘Combed Thunder’; ‘O time thy pyramids’), Peck’s story is more of a scientific enquiry into the library; just how big would it be and what would happen to human consciousness over the unimaginable length of time it would take to find your book? Peck’s library is so vast that if you jumped over the balcony you would be falling for millions of years before you hit the ground floor. He explores the human capacity for violence and madness, as well as the human instinct for love and connection – and he taps into what feels like a primal fear of very big numbers. It’s by turns funny, touching and absolutely horrifying.