Each story is accompanied by a brief analysis of the story's principal themes, meaning and literary character, while accompanying notes explain technical terms and references. In addition, to underscore the oral nature of the stories, the author offers translations of several versions of the same story, showing how later versions are more embellished and elaborate. The book treats the rabbinic stories not as accurate history, but as didactic fictions that model character, teach virtue and provide lessons.

There is no standard corpus of rabbinic stories available, says Rubenstein, and therefore this volume is a unique resource for courses on Judaism and rabbinic culture, comparative religions and religious narrative. Anyone interested in Jewish culture, early Christianity, folklore and Late Antique culture will find it to be fascinating reading as well.

The second problem involves the format of the book. The stories are grouped thematically, which is fine, with an introduction to each chapter and sometimes to each story. Rubenstein admits in his general introduction that the individual introductions presume familiarity with the story, which means that the reader has to flip back and forth from introduction to story. To make things even more complicated, a lot of important information (definitions, notes on wordplay, explications of difficult passages, and so on) is provided in endnotes, forcing the reader to flip from intro to story to endnotes and back again. I found this process very annoying, made more so by the fact that the introductions are nothing special (usually just a summary of the story, with perhaps a statement of the most obvious moral and a few comments on the narrative structure).

Rubenstein follows the practice of form analytical criticism, breaking each story down into very brief sections labeled with letters and numbers, in order to emphasize the structure of each story and to facilitate comparison between different versions. This can be helpful (particularly when dealing with different versions of the same story), but can also be distracting, and is occasionally forced (for example, in order to give each of the four parts of the Yerushalmi's story of Elisha b. Abuya a "tripartite" structure, Rubenstein seems to ignore an obvious break in [A](3) (which would give it four parts), and creates an artificial break between [D](2) and [D](3)).

Most significantly, by the halfway point, I found myself questioning the purpose of a book that collects rabbinic stories, pulling them out of their context of explicating either the law or the Bible. Apart from some of the obvious morals, I repeatedly found myself wondering why the rabbis told this particular story, and what function it served in a larger argument. For example, why is the story of the destruction of the Temple told in Tractate Gittin (which deals with the law of divorce)? How much more meaningful is the Oven of Akhnai in the context of the discussion of the sin of "verbal wronging"? Although many of the stories here can stand on their own as examples of the folktales or fables of a particular culture, most of them are also part of a larger argument and can support a much deeper analysis than is given here.

This selection of stories does have the virtue of being fairly short and a very quick read. It is also a faithful translation and allows you to compare different versions (unlike, for example, the Sefer Ha-Aggadah (The Book of Legends), which is much more complete but "retells" the stories and combines variants). Overall, not a bad introduction, but with very little meat on the bones.