About the Central European Classics series: The new Central European Classics series was born some ten years ago in the dim cafes of Budapest and Prague when General Editor Timothy Garton Ash began jotting down titles recommended to him by local writers. Its aim is to take these works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century classic fiction "out of the ghetto," onto the shelves of Western booksellers, and into the consciousness of Western readers. The result of extensive discussion among writers, scholars, and critics, the rich tradition of Central European fiction has been culled to offer previously unavailable works written in Czech, Hungarian, and Polish that lend themselves perfectly to powerful and accurate translation. Specially commissioned introductions by leading Central European writers explain why these titles have become classics in their own country, while at the same time, the works stand on their own as great literature in English. The Central European Classics series will contribute to a deeper understanding of the culture and history of countries which, since the opening of iron curtain, have been coming closer to us in many other ways. Gyula Krúdy was a precursor of Proust, Woolf, and magic realism, writing in the borderline between the nineteenth-century empires and the modern world. In The Adventures of Sinbad , he presents us with a sumptuous mixture of old-fashioned elegance and surprising modernity. In these lively tales, Sinbad, the romantic and seducer, travels through centuries, pursuing his ideal of love which is directed as much at the feminine essence as at individual lovers.

Sinbad is by nature a melancholy sensualist, and the women he seduces and loves may simply be projections of his desire or he of theirs. These short stories move without a strict narrative framework, much as Sinbad dodges in and out of time throughout his adventures. Not fully believing in even himself, Sinbad appears as a ghost in many of the tales, and undergoes magical transformations into objects, moving between the worlds of spirit and flesh, and back again. Krúys work is also a splendid document of the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the world of Joseph Roth, Schnitzler, and Musil, seen in erotic romantic mode at the moment before its fall becomes predictable. The tales are rife with irony, deeply autumnal, and full of resonances and associations.