This is the complete collection of Oscar Mandel's fiction, including the Gobble-Up Stories, Chi Po and the Sorcerer, and The History of Sigismund, Prince of Poland. The products of a life spent learning and thinking, these stories offer surprising insight into the human condition through fables and fanciful tales rooted in philosophy. Drawing on the French narrative form of the conte and following in the fabulist traditions of Jean de La Fontaine, Edmond Rostand, and Pedro Calderón, Mandel challenges the reader with glowing prose, a sly wit, and ethical ambiguity couched in delicious and amusing tales of animals, princes, and kings.

Oscar Mandel is a Belgian-born American author and professor emeritus of literature at the California Institute of Technology. His many published works range across the fields of poetry, drama, fiction, the essay, literary scholarship and theory, translations (especially from French and German), and art history. He splits his time between Paris, France, and Los Angeles, California.