Lost Manuscripts

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 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.

The Book, without attributes — a myth the child remembers, of which every actual volume is a clumsy falsification, including the one Father leaves on the table.

A Hyperborean grimoire that has come down, Smith says, through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in a lost language — the Necronomicon's older cousin, from the other end of the correspondence.

A battered dwarf-record of Balin's attempt to recolonise Moria, found on his tomb. The last line trails off in another alphabet: they are coming.

A small brown book of the myths and legends of a dying Earth, carried across four volumes by a torturer who cannot forget anything he reads.

An unpublished monograph, or a hypothesis that refuses to become one: that Ross's Nobel was steered by a secret Calcutta practice whose first method is not to write anything down.

A seventeenth-century revenge tragedy, complete with poisoned saints' feet and a lake full of bones, whose surviving texts do not agree on whether they mention Trystero.

A Latin grimoire written in prison by a Flemish sorcerer who claimed to have survived the Ninth Crusade, and printed in Cologne the year after they burned him.

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.

A novelist's notebook about the novel he is writing, which has the same title as the novel you are reading — Gide's cubist joke, and still the cleanest machine for watching a book invent itself.

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 Victorian narrative poem about the Breton fairy who married a mortal on condition he never look at her on Saturdays — written by a woman who was trying to remain unseen.

An incoherent manuscript left by a Chinese governor who abandoned power to write a novel and build a labyrinth. His heirs found the novel unreadable and the labyrinth missing. They were the same object.

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 detective novel whose printed solution is wrong. A last paragraph lets the reader notice, go back, and outsmart the detective.

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 Arabic history of a knight, found in the Alcana of Toledo, translated by a Morisco for a few raisins and wheat, from which — so the frame insists — Don Quixote was put into Spanish.

Two books of the same title: a standard history of 1147, sabotaged by a single negation, and the novel a proofreader then has to write, in which the crusaders do not help take Lisbon and a love story has room to happen.

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.

An unfinished epic by a foul-mouthed, centuries-old poet, about the passing of the self-styled Titans called humans — and, he comes to believe, a poem that summons the thing that is killing them.

A poem, misunderstood by the Right and the Left alike, by the only talented writer in an Argentine clan that had had its baby photographed in Hitler's arms.

A novel that begins, breaks off, and is replaced by another novel that begins and breaks off — ten times — while the Reader tries to find a complete copy of the book in his hands.

A film so entertaining that the people who watch it stop doing anything else, including living. Its title is the novel's. Its other name is simply the Entertainment.

A Sanskrit epic as long as the Ramayana, written by the woman who grew a city from seeds, whispered its citizens their lives, and at two hundred and forty-seven sealed the poem in a pot for whoever came after.

A vast unfinished work intended to show that all the world's myths are corruptions of a single original revelation — compiled by a man who cannot read German, will not finish a chapter, and marries a young woman to be his secretary.

A play in two acts. The first is harmless, even banal. The second, once read, is not something a mind comes back from.

A Bengali merchant's tale — flight from the snake goddess Manasa, drought, ships, a land without serpents called Gun Island — that a sceptical bookseller is asked to treat as a document, and that the climate then starts to corroborate.

A letter from a fabulous Christian king beyond the Muslims, full of marvels and political convenience — which Baudolino says he helped to write, and which, in our world, really did circulate in the twelfth century.

Thirteen diary entries by a man who sees cannibalism in every page of the Confucian tradition, framed as a recovered manuscript by a friend who reports that the author is now a candidate for an official post.

A map of the Empire whose size was the size of the Empire, coinciding point for point with it — later abandoned to the sun and the winters, in the deserts, inhabited by animals and beggars.

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.

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.

The novel Schulz was writing when he was shot in Drohobycz — a Messiah coming toward the town from the eastern Carpathians — which survived, if it survived, as a rumour, a forged bundle, and a fire.

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.

An autobiography that stops after the dedication — "to those who see with one eye, who speak with one tongue" — on a shelf of English books in a triangular room in a village on the Nile, with not one volume in Arabic.

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.

A Venetian folio of 1666, illustrated with nine woodcuts, said to be a working copy of a book Lucifer wrote. Three copies survive. They do not quite agree.

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.

A poem begun by a boy in an Elizabethan oak park and finished by a woman in a motor-car, about the English land, taking three hundred years because the poet had to become several people first.

An ocean whose waters are stories, polluted by a cult of silence, fed from a wellspring that must not be dammed — the library as a sea, which is the only form that can hold every tale at once.

A District Commissioner's planned book on the civilising of the Lower Niger, in which the man we have just spent a novel with will make interesting reading — perhaps not a whole chapter.

A poem in four cantos, 999 lines, about a man's life, his daughter's death, and the persistence of pattern — printed in full, then kidnapped by a commentator who is sure it is about him.

A Sanskrit chronicle of Macondo, written in advance of the lives it records, which the last Aureliano finishes reading as the wind erases the town — and which is, at that moment, the novel in your hands.

A Bolivian scriptwriter's daily soaps — nuns, judges, disastrous love — which begin as separate worlds and then leak characters into one another as their author comes apart.

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 world-conspiracy, generated for a joke from occult manuscripts and a computer named Abulafia, which occultists then treat as a document and try to extract the secret from — hanging one of its authors from a pendulum when he will not hand it over.

Lovecraft's first invented book, older than the species that later tries to read it — fragments from a library-city that was not built by men.

A red-leather manuscript of hobbit memoirs and translated Elvish lore, from which — so the frame insists — The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were translated into English.

The genuinely lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, dealing with comedy — reconstructed by Eco, hidden in a Benedictine library, and defended by a murderer who poisoned its pages.

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.

A woman castaway's history of an island, a taciturn Cruso, and a tongueless Friday — the story she desires to be known by, which the man of letters will not write as she wrote it.

The history of a sentient stone, left over from the repairing of the sky, that begged to see the world of red dust — copied off its own surface and read, in our world, as the great novel of a declining house.

A book of dragon-summoning stolen from the Unseen University Library by a secret society, on the theory that a dragon would make an excellent political instrument.

A symbolist play about the world-soul at the end of time, performed once, on a homemade stage, to a mother who cannot stop being an audience, and then put in the stove.

A German study of surviving secret cults, printed in Düsseldorf in 1839. Its author was strangled six months later in a locked room, and the manuscript of his second book was torn to shreds.

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.