"The Golden Pot: A Fairy Tale for Our Time" is a modernization of an old and celebrated art fairy tale (Kunstmärchen) by the German Gothic storyteller, E.T.A. Hoffmann. It is a comic novel for children of all ages and tells the story of graduate student Anselm MacGregor, as he braves the perils of a spiritual journey from ignorance to enlightenment. The tale is set in the concrete jungle of the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area of today, a most unlikely, yet fascinating, locale for fairy-tale doings. Young Anselm, a penurious Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Empyrean U., lives on peanut butter sandwiches and is only too happy to take a part-time job transcribing old manuscripts in arcane languages to the computer for John Lindhurst, a local archivist. This becomes his psychospiritual apprenticeship, an ordeal involving him in many treacherous trials, including imprisonment in a glass bottle and the lures of two beautiful women who compete, at times necromantically, for his love.