Preface -- Part I: The Still Waters of Narrative: The Boring and the Plotless -- Conversational and Authorial Disclosure in the Dialogue Novel: The Case of The Friends of Eddie Coyle -- Resistance to Plot and Uneven Narrativity: A Journey from "A Boring Story" to The Rings of Saturn -- What Happens When Nothing Happens: Interpreting Narrative Technique in the Plotless Novels of Nicholson Baker -- Events Can Be Quoted (and Words Need Not Be) -- Pynchon's Poetics of Boredom: Cognitive and Textual Aspects of Novelistic Dreariness -- Part II: A Web of Sense: Interpreting the Disturbing and the Difficult -- Toward a Zoonarratology: Storytelling and Species Difference in Animal Comics -- Watching a Tree Grow: Terrence Malick's The New World and the Nature of Cinema -- Navigating - Making Sense - Interpreting (The Reader behind La Jalousie) -- History Impossible: Narrating and Motivating the Past -- Unnatural Temporalities: Interfaces between Postmodernism, Science Fiction, and the Fantastic -- The Imperfect Is Our Paradise: Intertextuality and Fragmentary Narration in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace -- Fragile Narrative Situations: Conrad Compared to Sebald -- Part III: Shadow of a Tail: Problems of Authorship -- Name Change and Author Avatars in Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi -- Stranger than Fiction, or, Jerome David Salinger, Author of Lolita: Real, Implied and Fictive Authorship -- Translators, Scoundrels and Gentlemen of Honor: Problems of Nabokov's Loyalty -- Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry -- A Shadow on the Marble -- Index.