Biography

Death keeps a library containing one book for every person who has ever lived or will live. Each writes itself, continuously, in real time, and stops mid-sentence.

A hostile, opportunistic, extensively researched biography published within weeks of its subject's death. Almost everything in it is true, which is the problem.

A mocking, meticulous life of the radical critic Chernyshevsky, written in Berlin by a young émigré who is done with civic piety, and so true to its author's taste that the journal publishing the novel around it would not print the chapter.

A sixty-page life of a blind shamisen master, printed on handmade paper for a memorial, written in the old literary style, in which the devoted pupil who supplied every fact appears only in the third person.

An unfinished biography of an invented eighteenth-century intriguer, abandoned when the biographer realises he has been using a dead man to justify being alive.