Table of Contents

Foreword
1: Four imagined meetings
2: Schismogenesis and Semantic Polarities
3: Joyce: a winner looking to lose
4: Good boy, bad boy
5: The reader's address
6: Terrifying Bliss
7: Worthy Writer, Worthy Readers
Conclusion: We must defend ourselves

About the Author

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks studied at Cambridge and Harvard before moving permanently to Italy in 1981. Author of three bestselling books on Italy, and fifteen novels, including the Booker short-listed Europa, and most recently Painting Death, he has translated works by Moravia, Calvino, Calasso, Machiavelli, and Leopardi. While running a post-graduate degree course in translation at IULM University, Milan, he writes regularly for the
LRB and the NYRB. His non-fiction works include, Translating Style, A Literary Approach to Translation Problems, Medici Money, an account of the relation between banking, the Church and art in the 15th century, and four
accounts of life in contemporary Italy, Italian Neighbours, An Italian Education, A Season with Verona and Italian Ways, on and off the rails from Milan to Palermo.

Reviews

an unmissable book ... The Novel: A Survival Skill, Parks' journal through the coercive emotional strategies of Joyce, Hardy, Dickens and others, is biographical and psychoanalytic criticism of the best kind.
*Edmund Gordon, TLS books of the year 2015*

for all its big ideas, this book is written in a highly accessible, conversational way, and, as we might expect, with a lot of personality.
*A Hermit's Progress*

A fascinating book which beautifully connects up our motives for reading and writing novels with our deepest psychological impulses.
*Alain De Botton*