S a Gothic novel quite an extraordinary piece of writing Czeslaw Milosz a work of magical intricacy which carries the torch of fantasy into our own century The baffled Alphonse is a precursor of the Kafka hero or the automata of the nouveau roman Dawid Coward

A collection of loosely related stories, presented as if found in an anonymous manuscript in Saragossa by an unnamed French officer. Also included (by the editor) are a selection of short stories originally published in the 1813 edition of "Avadoro."

Alphonse, a young Walloon officer, is travelling to join his regiment in Madrid in 1739. But he soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a highway inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabbalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over sixty-six days. The resulting manuscript is discovered some forty years later in a sealed casket, from which tales of characters transformed through disguise, magic and illusion, of honour and cowardice, of hauntings and seductions, leap forth to create a vibrant polyphony of human voices. Jan Potocki (1761-1812) used a range of literary styles - gothic, picaresque, adventure, pastoral, erotica - in his novel of stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provides entertainment on an epic scale.

This is an extraordinary collection of tales that is sure to appeal to all readers of the weird and supernatural. Written in French by a Polish nobleman and first published, almost secretly, in St. Petersburg in 1804. During the wars in Spain, an officer of the Walloon Guards finds, in a deserted castle in Saragossa, a manuscript of such absorbing interest that he carries it with him on his campaign. Taken prisoner by the Spaniards, he falls into the hands of a Spanish officer who claims that the manuscript belonged to his family. The Spaniard proceeds to dictate to his prisoner, now an honored guest in the officer's house, the remaining stories in this collection.