Guy Davenport's first collection of fiction, now available in paperback, draws on history (real or imagined) to re-create events from the lives of characters as diverse as Franz Kafka, the Soviet engineer-painter-theoretician Tatlin, and the ancient Greek philosopher Herakleitos. These six stories are unified by their dominant themes: that the modern is a renaissance of the archaic, that our age is in a quandary as to what is animate and what is inanimate, that the belief that time can be reversed might be more congenial to mankind than reiterated mechanization. Davenport's tales are brilliant - and always surprising. - Back cover.