These eight stories by Guy Davenport are extraordinary. His fiction becomes a historical and linguistic collage, "assemblages," he has said, "of history and necessary fiction". We follow time through Thebes under Spartan rule, the Athens of Diogenes, a Civil War field hospital, Bordeaux, Bologna, and the English countryside in the 20th century.

Mixtures of myth and fable, these tales have their origins in Plutarch, Montaigne, The Acts of the Apostles, Theokritos, and the daily newspaper.