Fourteen enactments of radical undoing by the acclaimed author of Leonardo's Horse and Plane Geometry and Other Affairs of the Heart. Reviews of unwritten novels, prefaces to fraudulent books, narratives of dictionary entries, and one interminable sentence, all written in a style as strewn with landmines as everyday speech.

In "Samuel Beckett's Middlemarch" a scholar undertakes to reconstruct the deceased author's reputation after the discovery of a thousand page realist novel among Beckett's posthumous papers. The novel, about an idealistic young Englishwoman in a nineteenth-century...