Another favorite Ted Chiang short story: "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate". To me, it's one of the few stories that manage to incorporate time travel and still have it be meaningful while avoiding paradoxes.
What's great is that it's a straight sci-fi story that could be dropped into the Zipes adaptation of One Thousand and One Nights and none would be the wiser.
Definitely. It's actually one of those stories that I wouldn't be surprised if it inspires some new ideas for those who try to do serious research on time travel (or the polite way to say time travel among physicists: closed timelike curves.)
