Reading style: a life in sentences

The glimmer factor: Anthony Burgess's 99 novels

Lord Leighton, Liberace, and the advantages of bad writing: Helen Dewitt, Harry Stephen Keeler, Lionel Shriver, George Eliot

Mouthy pleasures and the problem of momentum: Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem

The acoustical elegance of aphorism: Kafka, Fielding, Austen, Flaubert

Tempo, repetition, and a taxonomy of pacing: Peter Temple, Neil Gaiman, A. L. Kennedy, Edward P. Jones

Late Style: The golden bowl and Swann's way

Disordered sentences: Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante

Details that linger and the charm of voluntary reading: George Pelecanos, Stephen King, Thomas Pynchon

The ideal bookshelf: the rings of Saturn and the line of beauty

The bind of literature and the bind of life: Voices from Chernobyl, Thomas Bernhard, Karl Ove Knausgaard.