This collection assembles the works of fiction that Charles Nodier (1780-1844), one of the great pioneers of the French Romantic Movement, published during the first of the three distinct phases into which his troubled literary career was divided, and were all first published during the years when France was ruled by Napoléon Bonaparte.

Superbly translated by Brian Stableford, the pieces contained herein, which include the novellas "The Outlaws" and "The Painter of Salzburg," were mostly written under the powerful influence of Goethe's Werther, and, like that masterpiece, can be considered proto-Romantic texts, and are key to their author's later development.

With their distraught and disillusioned heroes, extreme sentimentalism, and countless philosophical asides, the stories and short pieces of Outlaws and Sorrows offer a long overdue prospect of the early work of one of the most significant, and most unusual, writers of prose fiction, of his time, or any other.