CONTENTS

  1.  The Glimmer Factor: Anthony Burgess’s 99 Novels

  2.  Lord Leighton, Liberace and the Advantages of Bad Writing: Helen DeWitt, Harry Stephen Keeler, Lionel Shriver, George Eliot

  3.  Mouthy Pleasures and the Problem of Momentum: Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem

  4.  The Acoustical Elegance of Aphorism: Kafka, Fielding, Austen, Flaubert

  5.  Tempo, Repetition and a Taxonomy of Pacing: Peter Temple, Neil Gaiman, A. L. Kennedy, Edward P. Jones

  6.  Late Style: The Golden Bowl and Swann’s Way

  7.  Disordered Sentences: Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante

  8.  Details That Linger and the Charm of Voluntary Reading: George Pelecanos, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon

  9.  The Ideal Bookshelf: The Rings of Saturn and The Line of Beauty

10.  The Bind of Literature and the Bind of Life: Voices from Chernobyl, Thomas Bernhard, Karl Ove Knausgaard

Notes

A Reading List

Index