Happiness and friendship; love and beauty; art and revolution-these and other themes are investigated by the sometimes caustic, sometimes lyrical pen of Yiddish writer Hersh Dovid Nomberg (1876-1927). From unhealthy friendships, debauchery and petty rivalry, to cramped rooms, fever dreams and creeping dread, this collection of nineteen texts, compiled and translated by Daniel Kennedy, contains a mixture of naturalist short stories, symbolist prose poems, unsettling decadent vignettes, and expressionistic fairy tales from a half-forgotten master of Yiddish letters. "Nomberg never wrote a sentence that didn't contain the seeds of an idea." - Froyim Kaganovski