The seventies were a particularly slow period. He spent all of 1973 poring over a single word, and most of 1974 erasing it.

C.D. Rose gathers all manners of authorial misfortune in his collection of imagined authors. I have to admire his Borgesian project as well as his conceit. The traces of the latter afford one the grim grin when pondering the Pens of Omission.

It wasn't until I had finished the book this evening that I realized the author hails from Manchester. He laments the dearth of a true Mancunian Sage in one of the final pieces. I'm not sure this achievement will pave the way for posterity. Such is the terrain of this survey: the references litter the ground and while you are chuckling at a nod to Wu MIng or 50 Shades, you miss the glib segues to Paul Nizan or Miodrag Bulatovic.

Any taxonomy of failure should be frustrating or boring. How many errors can we ponder without losing interest? The encapsulated contexts proved sufficient for me and I thus breezed along, even after considering dumping the book 2-3 times in the initial 50 pages. There is an adroit eye for detail and it is effective.
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A very amusing little book, beautifully set, humorous and poignant, with unexpected and subtle wistfulness between the lines. ( )

A deeply imaginative exercise in literary loss, told through fifty-two short vignettes of (fictional) would-be authors who weren't, extremely prolific authors whose works are utterly unknown to us today ... even writers who literally ate their own words. While there were a few elements of this that I found just a bit too gimmicky, overall I enjoyed the ride, particularly the intertwining of the authors and works that I began to recognize about midway through. A neat concept, well executed. ( )