Includes selections from Selected non-fictions (Penguin, 1999), plus ten new translations Includes bibliographical references
Contents:
Becoming a man of letters; ultra manifesto; on expressionism; after images; Joyce's Ulysses; the ballad of reading Gaol Word music; verbiage for poems; an investigation of the word; the art of verbal abuse; on literary description; on metaphor; Walt Whitman, Leaves of grass (prologue) On translation; two ways to translate; the Homeric versions Reading as writing; a profession of literary faith; literary pleasure; the superstitious ethics of the reader; the paradox of apollinaire; Kafka and his precursors; Flaubert and his exemplary destiny The critic at work; Virginia Woolf (capsule biography); T. S. Eliot (capsule biography); Paul Valery (capsule biography); William Faulkner, Absalom! absalom!; Herman Mellville, Bartleby the scrivener; Henry James, The abasement of the Northmores; Marcel Schwob, imaginary lives; H. G. Wells, The time machine; The invisible man (prologue); Julio Cortazar, stories (prologue) The perfect plot; the labyrinths of the detective story and Chesterton Ellery Queen, The halfway house; Adolfo Bioy Casares, The invention of morel (prologue) Wilkie Collins, The moonstone; the detective story Narrative art; stories from Turkestan; the cinematograph, the biograph; narrative art and magic; preface to a universal history of infamy; when fiction lives in fiction
