The 2004 Canongate Books edition is updated with an author's note in which Martel writes that he is "happy to offer these four stories again to the reading public, slightly revised, the youthful urge to overstate reined in, the occasional clumsiness in prose, I hope, ironed out."

All the stories except Manners of Dying have a distinct auto-biographical feel to them, the protagonist being a young white male university student having an existential crisis.

To organize the plot of their strange attempt at fiction they use Encyclopædia Britannica extracts from each year starting from 1901 until present (1986) metaphorically to write each chapter.

In this epistolary novel Mr. Harry Parlington, warden at the Cantos Correctional Institution, writes to a Mrs. Barlow describing how her son, Kevin, executed in prison, experienced and faced his death.

An anecdotal story about a young man who visits his talkative grandmother and while rummaging in her attic finds a machine that makes mirrors out of 4 ingredients: oil, sand, silver and memories.