As The Los Angeles Times wrote, New Mysteries of Paris is "not so much stories as character sketches, artfully drawn, as though told by people very close to their subjects - the narrator of Andr Breton's Nadja, a companion of King Farouk, the painter August Mack describing the young Paul Klee. Gifford is relentless in his imaginative scrutiny of human frailty." The four stories that evolve through each narrator's soul-searching are by turns straightforward, fantastic, bitter and erotic.