A unique work of world literature by a legendary Argentinian-Italian novelist and poet. Here are fictional biographies of the world's greatest eccentrics, visionaries, and crackpots.On these pages you'll find Rosenblum who, from an armchair in England, hatches a complicated plot to return the world to the year 1580-reintroducing ruffs, doublets, codpieces, and sundry period diseases, Littlefield who, by sheer force of will, discovers that he's able to crystallize table salt into the shapes of chickens and other small animals, Babson who found an international organization with the declared aim of annulling the law of gravity.J. Rodolfo Wilcock blends mordant satire and profound imaginative sympathy, taking in the whole dazzling spectrum of human folly-including a handful of colors that only the author could possibly have perceived.Publishers Weekly wrote, "Compellingly whimsical, alienated, pseudo-scientific, bizarre: all these adjectives describe this fiction in the form of a short reference work, the first book by admired Argentinian-Italian novelist Wilcock to be published in English...Venuti renders Wilcock's Italian into lucid, captivating English, and offers a biographical introduction. Ideal for lovers of postmodern mind games.