Description: "Except among a few film and music scholars, Balzs is barely remembered, and only four books from the mountain of his works--novels, stories, poetry, plays, puppet plays, screenplays, libretti, political articles, and film criticism--have ever been translated into English. But he was an archetypal modernist, a type that is now nearly extinct: the man who seemed to know everyone, do everything, and write everything. . . . Unlike others, [Balzs] did not believe that the movies would mean the end of stories and novels, and it is not surprising that he wrote The Cloak of Dreams at the same time that he wrote his first screenplay. In the present moment, when fiction has yet again been declared dead, these deliberately anachronistic, pseudo-Oriental, and completely delightful tales are further examples of the perennial human need for imaginative narrative told in words." --Eliot Weinberger, New York Review of Books

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