The following table of contents is from the most recent Wesleyan University Press edition: In earlier editions, the novel The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals was listed as an appendix; the "Postscript", which brings the story of "Joey" (presumably based on a real person), one of the characters in Plagues and Carnivals, up to date, was not yet included; nor was the discussion with a reader, Robert Wentworth, of "Buffon's Needle," a mathematical reference to something that occurs in tale number six, the full-length novel Neveryóna.

It dramatizes the problems this makes for a nameless young smuggler who has become fascinated by Gorgik and, though he has never met or seen him, is actively trying to find out anything and everything he can about him — rather like a fan pursuing all information available about a favorite rock singer.

Here the doubling that works through all the tales is with a silent auditor to the mummer's story, a man whom we learn is a teacher, a philosopher, a lover and supporter of the arts (a democratic minded prince, who has given up his title to pursue his intellectual work), and who has known the narrator over the same period, and has been his friend over the same twenty years — but has never met with or known till now the mummer's petty criminal friend.

In this story (“The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” [1984]), the parallels between the way Nevèrÿon handles its situation and the way current day New York City in the second year of the AIDS epidemic handled it become explicit, and the full flexibility of the story series is exploited: Many of the scenes take place in the modern streets of New York City, with reports about actual homeless folk, drug addicts, and hustlers that Delany knew at the time.

A high point of the story is the Master's attempt, as a young man, to travel throughout Nevèrÿon and collect material for a biography of the Barbarian genius Belham, dead a generation before, whose name is connected with many of the land's architectural wonders.