Last Letter to a Reader

In the first days of spring in his eighty-second year, Gerald Murnane—perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose—began a project that would round off his strange career as a novelist. He would read all of his books in turn and prepare a report on each. His original intention was to lodge the reports in two of his legendary filing cabinets: in the Chronological Archive, which documents his life as a whole, and the Literary Archive, which is devoted to everything he has written.

As t...