Complete and unabridged, with 40 full-page plates by Arnold Böcklin, Gustave Doré and Francisco Goya. Boswell, deceased, dictates to a typewriter in New Jersey the doings of the Associated Shades — Hamlet, Shakespeare, Cassius, Xanthippe, Baron Munchausen — as they run a club, a newspaper and a lawsuit in the afterlife. Bangs edited Harper's humour pages and invented the genre that bears his name; the joke is that eternity turns out to be exactly like Newark. Forty plates by painters including Goya and Carl Spitzweg, from duels and dark spirits to cemeteries and thunderstorms, give the club's absurd afterlife its shadowed European backdrop.