Danilo Kis is one of the greatest voices of twentieth-century Europe. This collection of short fiction delves into uncanny characters, magical places and millennia of history. From the story of a counter-prophet, Simon Magus, who performs a blasphemous miracle in ancient Samaria, to 'Red Stamps with Lenin's Head', revealing the heartbroken secret of a poet's work, to 'The Encyclopedia of the Dead' an almighty catalogue of the life of every ordinary person to have died since 1789, these are tales brimming with imagination, horror, comedy and the sublime.