This latest offering from one of the most important philosophers of our time is a collection of fifteen "fables" that ask, in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, "how to live, and why?" Here, Lyotard provides a mixture of anarchistic irreverence and sober philosophical reflection on a wide range of topics, paying particular attention to issues of justice and ethics, aesthetics, and judgment.

Acerbic, critical, relentlessly ironic, continually burning bridges and burning rubber, always at high risk and in high gear, Postmodern Fables throws down the gauntlet to any and all who idealize comfort. In sections titled "Verbiages, " "System Fantasies, " "Concealments, " and "Crypts, " Lyotard unravels and reconfigures idealist notions of subjects as various and fascinating as the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the reception of French thought in the Anglo-American world, the events of May 1968, the Gulf War, academic travelers as intellectual tourists, the collapse of communism, and his own work in the context o others'.