"This is one of the best anthologies I have ever read. It now has 43 tales in it, all of them exciting, all beautifully translated, ranging from the Austro-Hungarian decadence to modern science fiction. It also has excellent introduction, describing the particular qualities of Austrian - as opposed to German, or any other - literatures. The Austro-Hungarina Empire before the second world war was elegant, frivolous, possessed by baroque images of death and dissolution, full of witty sidelong comments on ossified political structures, in the form of bureaucracies and castles. Both od these were explored by Kafka, who is central in this anthology, in that there are three tales by him, and his rediscovery after the nazi period has been a dominant and clearly benign influence on modern Austrian writing. The Austrians, according to Mitchell, have complementary passions for detail and for the dissolution of boundaries - between the real and the unreal, between dream and waking, between life and death. One of Mitchell's great achievements is the juxtaposition of a string of tales in which people hover between life and death, in a kind of animated limbo, constructed with a love of detail rather than a desire to create vague horror." A.S. Byatt, Book of the Week in The Guardian
