"What is vital reading, vital generosity, and the courage to make these two, now often submerged crafts, immediately present? Here in Mark Axelrod's essays these acts are given a generative and imaginative intricacy, beautifully shaped and recorded. They evoke transformation, discovery, and a repository of experienced consciousness that has the nerve to both speak and challenge ... Read more and return these things to their precarious wonders." -Author of How the Night is Divided and A HalfMan Dreaming "In No Symbols Where None Intended, Mark Axelrod deconstructs the dramatic dimension of Laclos, Turgenev, and Beckett. Continuing Nabokov and Benjamin's rare tradition of critical virtuosity, Axelrod takes his nuanced arguments, themselves a wonder of structure and style, through a grand detour of original insights and never fails to bring them back home to unexpected and illuminating conclusions." - Pablo Baler, Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, California State University, Los Angeles, USA Show Less