Alfau's "comedy of gestures" - a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy - was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for "The Nation" by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts here in her Afterword, then long neglected.

    Contents include: Three Golden Oranges / Tio Paco and His Wonderful Donkey / Tonino and the Fairies / Don Demonio's Mother-In-Law / The Shepherd Who Laughed Last / The Golden Parrot / The Tinker and the Ghost / The Goatherd Who Won a Princess / The Silver Flute / Black Magic.