Novel

A Bombay detective novel, reviewed in detail, in which a law student hunts a man he has never seen — and the hunted man may be God, or the hunter, or a series of mirrors.

A novel that runs backwards and splits: thirteen chapters, nine possible books, one railway platform at the end — or the beginning — of all of them.

A roman à clef issued under a dead woman's name, about unnamed lovers in rented rooms, and inside that a pulp tale of a blind assassin and a mute girl on the planet Zycron.

A last novel in which a man is dying, and he is the book — heaving, drawing up a ghostly knee — written by a Russian who had switched to English and would not be around to explain it.

The second novel of a vanished German, about which we are told that a publisher stayed up two nights, woke his wife, and said they would have to publish it — and almost nothing else.

A novel, reviewed at length, that treats the Epic of Gilgamesh the way Joyce treated the Odyssey — compressed into the thirty-six minutes it takes to walk a condemned American soldier from his cell to the noose.

A writer's attempt to keep life in separate books — black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for fiction, blue for the day — and the fifth notebook in which the divisions fail.

A novel, reviewed and not written, in which an ex-Nazi in the South American jungle recreates the court of pre-Revolutionary France and decrees that German shall be French.

An Australian novelist's rewriting of Ulysses in which Molly Bloom leaves the bedroom, walks Dublin, and is no longer required to be Joyce's idea of a woman.

A novel of Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Notsri, burned by its author after a Soviet journal destroyed him, and given back by the Devil with the remark that manuscripts don't burn.

An unfinished counter-novel whose notes tell you to read in any order, leave the important lines out, and treat the reader as an accomplice — which is, not coincidentally, the method of the book that contains them.

A book that changes the lives of the people who finish it, quoted nowhere, hunted by a father who would rather murder readers than let the new life spread. Pamuk's novel has the same name and will not show you a page.

An unfinished love story that becomes a captivity: a woman who loses her voice, types to the man who taught her, and is locked in a tower until the room absorbs her — written on an island from which novels themselves then disappear.

Several chapters of Don Quixote, word for word as Cervantes wrote them, produced independently by a symbolist from Nîmes who did not want to copy the book and did not want to compose another one.

A forgotten novel, perhaps the last copy, chosen by a bookseller's son in a secret library — while a man who has taken the name of the Devil from its pages burns every other one.

The novels of a man the narrator loved on the page and found, in person, ordinary — until the ordinary man dies in front of a little patch of yellow wall, and the books are what remain.

An oeuvre whose author says there is a single pattern running through it, visible once you have been told to look, and invisible to every reviewer who has ever praised him.