A collection of 15 fables from a founding figure of postmodernism that ask in the words of Jean-Francois Lyotard, "how to live and why?" Here Lyotard provides a mixture of anarchistic, irreverent and more sober philosophical reflection on a range of topics - with attention to issues of justice and ethics, and aesthetics and judgement. He unravels and reconfigures idealistic notions of subjects - such as the French Revolution, the Holocaust, the reception of French theory in the Anglo-American world, the events of May 1968, the Gulf War, the collapse of communism, and his own work in the context of others.