The four volumes deal with Moffett's real and dream life in the United States in 1977 (and, in an extended coda, into the early 1980s) with the narrative of the manuscript he is preparing for publication.
Another manuscript, left unfinished by its author Fellowes Kraft and discovered by Moffett, is an historical fiction that follows the briefly intersecting adventures of Italian heretic Giordano Bruno and of British occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley.
The novels generally have three main "strands" reflecting on three main characters, one occurring in the present day generally following Pierce or Rosie Mucho in their artistic works, and two occurring in the Renaissance following the fictionalized historical activities of John Dee, Edward Kelley and Giordano Bruno as written by Fellowes Kraft.
American literary critic Harold Bloom praised the first three books in the sequence, installing the first two in his 1993 list of the Western canon.
"[7] In an appreciation of Crowley's Little, Big in 2000, James Hynes called the then-unfinished sequence "an astonishing accomplishment" comparing it to works by Robertson Davies and Thomas Mann.