James Stephens (1880–1950) was an Irish novelist, poet and BBC radio presenter, a classic of 20th-century Irish literature, an expert and popularizer of the medieval Irish linguistic tradition. This active participant in the Irish Renaissance gave us five novels, three original collections of tales, a scattering of short prose and incredibly diverse poetry. Stevens is a bright, memorable star in the constellation of Irish modernism and ironic tradition with a strong Irish flavor. In 2018, his collection “Irish Wonderful Tales” (1920) was published in the project “Hidden Gold of the 20th Century”; it immediately fell in love with readers - both those who are well versed in the Irish literary universe, and those who, thanks to this collection, have just begun with it meet. In 2019, we decided to give our audience Stevens’s most famous work - a novel that became the writer’s calling card and forever created his reputation in the world of Western literature.