These stories serve as an introduction to Nicholas Hagger's five volumes totalling 1,001 stories (an echo of The Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights). They are grouped in two parts which reflect the two aspects of the fundamental theme of world literature outlined in his A New Philosophy of Literature: 'Follies and Vices' and 'Quest for the One'. These stories condemn follies and vices in relation to an implied virtue – more than 150 vices are listed in a Preface – and present moments of heightened consciousness in which the universe is perceived as a unity.
