Aside from its intellectual content, the essay provides a space for contemporary British novelists to enhance their career prospects. This takes the threefold forms of intertexual affiliation by co-publication within the same title as other writers; of creating a space in which to generate prestige-enhancing controversy; and of enabling novelists to hold academic affiliations. This chapter examines these features through a network analysis of the publications in The London Review of Books over the past two decades and then through case studies of Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Tom McCarthy, and Zadie Smith.

This chapter answers the question ’does central Europe exist?’ by first drawing a literary-historical line between Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, focusing particularly on the critical tensions in Kundera’s construction of a vanished culture and on the West’s mythologizing of central Europe. It then turns to two Prague-set novels, Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, which explores the condition of stubborn aesthetic individualism under communism, and Tom McCarthy’s Men in Space, set in the months following the splitting-up of Czechoslovakia in 1992. Beyond the Czech lands, the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, a significant work of avant-garde feminism, offers a doomed fantasy of post-war Austro-Hungarian relationships. Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, set in the Polish–Silesian borderlands, is a revenge thriller whose narrator is inspired by the radicalism of William Blake. These case studies signal the ways central Europe has been confabulated by British writers; they also show how an evolving canon of fiction-in-translation is appropriately pluralizing and updating the West’s idea of the ‘middle’.

Between the last chapter and this, silence changes its sign. Compared to the ludicrous reading in of significance to the visual filler of screen text is the normal reading out of sound from visual signs. Clarified by audio theorist Michel Chion are the different time frames of cinematic montage and alphabetic signage on screen. Pursuing the theme of temporality and writing, a literary-critical debate between Michael Riffaterre and Paul de Man over a poem by Victor Hugo turns on the poem’s lack of book or page for its text/medium interface – with indirect consequences for its phonetic substrate as well. From there, discussion moves to a famous auditory passage in Virginia Woolf and to a debate in media and film theory that returns to Chion in explicating the difference between the filmic photogram and a linguistic “phonogram,” the latter on exhibit in such novelists as Tom McCarthy and Don DeLillo.