""I am, if I may make so bod, a successful writer. For 20 years now, I have been working - neglected or misunderstood by the critics and envied by anyone who cannot make a living from their own work - on a chronicle of our family history." his is the beginning of a brilliantly funny, bitingly satrical collection of short story by the writer and publisher Michael Kruger which recalls both Paul Auster and Nicholson Baker with its literary wit. Anybody who has anything to do with books or who just enjoys reading them, sympathise with, laugh and cry with them. There is, for example, the editor, who kills his ungrateful author. Or the uncle who is working on the definitive encyclopaedia of the typo. Or the beast, a gift from the publisher to his valued author, which nurtured and cared by him - grows and grows and eventually crowds out everything and everybody else in the author's life.".