Nonfiction. Literary History & Criticism. Poetry. This book collects six commentaries written for the journal of the English Association The Use of English. The writers discussed are Andrea Zanzotto, Robert Musil, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Roth, José Saramago, Edvard Munch and Louis-René Des Forêts, while others who figure briefly there or elsewhere include Knut Hamsun, Kawabata Yasunari, Fernando Pessoa, Ai Weiwei, Robert Walser, Bohumil Hrabal, Cees Nooteboom, Roger Giroux, Paul Celan, Primo Levi, Valéry Larbaud, Tanizaki Jun'ichirõ, Guo Xiaolu. Also included are a discrete set of poems, a satire, a story of truth and untruth and a number of other prose pieces.