The novelist and critic Christine Brooke-Rose reflects on her own fictional craft and turns her well-developed analytic abilities on other writers fictional and critical, from Hawthorne and Pound to Bloom and Derrida, in an attempt to investigate those difficult border zones between the "invented" and the "real." The result is an extended meditation, in a highly personal idiom, on the creative act and its relation to modern theoretical writing and thinking. Like her fiction, Professor Brooke-Rose's criticism is self-consciously experimental, trying out and discarding ideas, adopting others. Her linguistic prowess, her uncommon role as a recognized writer of fiction and theory, and the relevance of her work to the feminist and other modern movements, all contribute to the interest of this unusual sequence of essays. Christine Brooke-Rose, formerly a professor at the Université de Paris, and now retired, lives in France. She is the author of several works of literary criticism and a number of novels, including Amalgamemnon and Xorander.