Free This is Not a Novel by David Markson

Oxford. The Keats was burned with his corpse at Viareggio.
    The Keats had been borrowed from Leigh Hunt.
    Alejo Carpentier died of throat cancer.
    Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probable that he never saw the ocean either.
    Venus clerk, Ovyde, That hath ysowen wonder wyde The grete god of Loves name.
    Marilyn Home’s tale that the first time she was asked to sing Semiramide the only way she could get her hands on a score was to steal it from the Los Angeles Public Library.
    In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?
    Asked Sydney Smith in 1819.
    Melville’s father died mad.
    Schopenhauer’s father jumped out of a window.
    The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese, Kierkegaard called reading one’s reviews.
    Berchtesgaden.
    Juden raus!
    The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.
    Milo of Crotona.
    The greatest painter of our era, Magritte called Giorgio de Chirico.
    Unsurprisingly.
    Jacob Epstein died of heart failure.
    Carl Gustav Jung died of heart failure.
    Every morning the author of Faust and Werther kisses me. In the afternoon I play for him for about two hours. Noted Felix Mendelssohn, at twelve.
    Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon! Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
    Derek Lindsay was who?
    Longfellow died of peritonitis.
    Frank Norris died of peritonitis.
    Selma Lagerlof died of peritonitis.
    Es inevitable la muerta del Papa.
    Bela Bartók died of leukemia.
    Charles Peguy was killed leading a charge in the first battle of the Marne.
    Alexander, young, broke Bucephalus—whom no one else could sit—simply by perceiving that he balked at his own shadow and riding him into the sun.
    Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.
    Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.
    Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic intercon-nective syntax.
    Here perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.
    Ulrich Friedrich Richard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf.
    Laurence Sterne died of pleurisy, after years of lung hemorrhages.
    Rousseau died of a stroke.
    The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.
    Gilles de Rais. Who was a marshal of France at twenty-five.
    And fought by Joan’s side at Orleans. And.
    Baudelaire often wore pink gloves.
    Martha Constantine, a handsome young woman, was treated with great indecency and cruelty by several of the troops, who first ravished, and then killed her by cutting off her breasts. These they fried, and set before some of their comrades, who ate them without knowing what they were.
    Records Fox’s Book of Martyrs.
    Clausewitz died of cholera.
    The Prince, the King, the Emperor, the God Almighty of novelists.
    Wilkie Collins called Walter Scott.
    Robin Vote.
    Vom Kriege.
    Walter Benjamin and Gertrud Kolmar were cousins.
    Monet dropped from the skies on me with a collection of magnificent pictures. I am now lodging two impecunious artists, for Renoir is also here. It’s like a nursing home. I love it.
    Said a letter of Frederic Bazille’s—four years before he was killed at twenty-nine in the Franco-Prussian War.
    Joe Tinker died of diabetes.
    Johnny Evers died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Frank Chance died of tuberculosis.
    The population of Athens at the height of its accomplishments was at best two hundred and seventy-five thousand.
    The population of Dante’s Florence was probably forty thousand.
    Abbotsford.
    Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zur-baran’s.
    Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.
    Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer.
    Hermann Prey died of a heart attack.
    A double play gives you two twenty-sevenths of a ball game.
    Pointed out Casey Stengel.
    Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.
    Writer’s arse.
    Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected