Stranger than fiction: lives of the twentieth-century novel

Prologue: the ellipsis: Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground

Part I. Breaking the vessels. 1. The vivisector: H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau

2. The abyss: André Gide's The Immoralist

3. Shutter time: Alfred Kubin's The Other Side and Franz Kafka's Amerika

4. Youth and age: Collette's Claudine at School and Rudyard Kipling's Kim

5. The American sentence: Gertrude Stein's Three Lives

6. A world of literature: Machado de Assis's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Natsume S?seki's Kokoro

7. Hippe's pencil: Thomas Mann's The Magic Machine

8. What did you do in the war? Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time and James Joyce's Ulysses

Part II. A scattering of sparks. 9. For there she was: Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dolloway

10. Nick stands up: Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time

11. Critic as creator: Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities