It first appeared in 1941 in the literary magazine Sur, and was then included in the 1941 collection The Garden of Forking Paths (El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan), which in turn became the part one of Ficciones (1944).
Translated into English by John M. Fein, it was published in Prairie Schooner, Fall 1959, and in Labyrinths (New Directions, 1962).
The story references Zeno's paradox by using the lottery as a metaphor for all the possible random occurrences that could occur between any two points in time.
The story may be a criticism of the tendency of humans to claim the authority of nature and capitalize on it, as the Company does with chance.
The public then fight over whether the slave should be punished because it is the penalty for stealing or because it is what the ticket decreed.