A sketch of the life, character, and public services of Thomas Jefferson, with some account of the aid he rendered in establishing our independence and government

Thus, we have Nabokov writing Despair, or the genre experiments of Borges. Thomas Pynchon can produce The Crying of Lot 49, a Californian anti-detective novel that leaves us awaiting a moment of revelation that does not come. There is no explanation at the end, because there cannot be. Sometimes I envy literary writers that freedom: the freedom not to explain. Ultimately, crime readers expect a solution, however partial, to the mystery with which they have been presented in the course of the book, and writers in the genre have a certain obligation to fulfill that expectation. Literary writers have no such obligation. Yet there are ways of subverting those expectations, even within the genre, so that some questions can remain unanswered or are, in fact, rendered more interesting by the fact that they are unanswerable. Thus, for me, the supernatural represents my small effort at genre subversion. VII After the publication of Dark Hollow, one of Belinda PereiraБЂ™s relatives got in touch with me. He had read the book not knowing that one of the characters was based on Belinda, and had only discovered the connection when he saw an interview I gave about the novel and its origins ...»