The incomparable Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our lives. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, this book is narrated by a character who is haunted--literally--by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.

How does a literary historian end up thinking in terms of z-scores, principal component analysis, and clustering coefficients? The essays in Distant Reading led to a new and often contested paradigm of literary analysis. In presenting them here Franco Moretti reconstructs his intellectual trajectory, the theoretical influences over his work, and explores the polemics that have often developed around his positions. From the evolutionary model of "Modern...