; "Simon Magus" :A "masterly tale", with two different endings, of a counter-prophet from the 1st century AD. Magus, a reported sorcerer, is confronted by
Peter (who is presented as a "tyrannical power") while preaching against Christianity and its god, and accepts a challenge to perform a miracle. In the first version,
he flies into the clouds to be thrown down by God; in the second, he is buried alive and after three days his body has putrefied. Both endings confirm his prophetic qualities, in the eyes of his followers. ; "Last Respects" :The death of a prostitute in Hamburg, 1923 or 1924, leads to "a miracle of revolutionary disobedience", an "elemental, irrational uprising" when her funeral is celebrated by the lower ranks of society, who pillage the flowers from all over the cemetery to place them on Marietta's grave. ; "The Encyclopedia of the Dead (A Whole Life)" :A scholar spends a night in the
Royal Library of Sweden where she gains access to
The Encyclopedia of the Dead, a unique exemplar of a book "containing the biography of every ordinary life lived since 1789". :The encyclopedia is the expression of a sociological and political philosophy; in the words of Gabriel Motola: "The scrupulous detail is necessary to the compilers of this encyclopedia because they believe that history is less the record of cataclysmic events caused by the high and mighty, who if mentioned in any other encyclopedia are automatically omitted from this one, than it is the sum total of everyday occurrences of ordinary folk". The narrator reads the entry on her father and tries to record as much as she can. The story was published in
The New Yorker, June 12, 1982. ; "The Legend of the Sleepers" :A retelling (from one of the sleepers' perspectives) of the legend of the
Seven Sleepers. ; "The Mirror of the Unknown" : A girl foresees in a mirror, bought for her from a gypsy, how her father and sisters will be murdered. ; "The Story of the Master and the Disciple" : In Prague, Ben Haas (a writer who combines art and morality, a combination otherwise thought impossible) takes on a mediocre writer as a disciple, who in turn denounces his former master. ; "To Die for One's Country Is Glorious" : Young Esterházy, of a noble family, is executed for having participated in a brief uprising against the
Habsburgs. His mother possibly participates in what could be a cruel scheme to assist Esterházy in keeping up appearances until the final moment. In a themed 1998 issue of the journal
Rowohlt Literaturmagazin devoted to Kiš, Hungarian poet
Péter Esterházy latches on to this story in his remembrance. ; "The Book of Kings and Fools" : Written as an alternate biography of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the story is a fictional history of a book,
The Conspiracy. Like
The Protocols,
The Conspiracy is said to be based on
Maurice Joly's
The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. According to Svetlana Boym, the story treats conspiracy theory as an "actual historical threat" which the narrator attempts to disrupt, a tragic effort doomed to failure since the "violence persists" even after "the facts have been revealed". : The influence of this story in particular on four contemporary authors serves as evidence for Andrew Wachtel that Kiš is the most influential Yugoslav author in post-Yugoslav literature. In addition, Kiš's portrayal of
Sergei Nilus formed the basis for
Umberto Eco's version of the character in ''
Foucault's Pendulum'' (1988). ; "Red Stamps with Lenin's Picture" : A woman explains in a letter to the biographer of Yiddish poet Mendel Osipovitch that she was the poet's long-time lover. In her account, she provides biographical detail and chastises his critics for their exaggerated and all-too literary interpretations ("lazy layers of psychoanalytic criticism", according to a reviewer in
The American). ==References==