You are about to begin reading a novel, and already the sentence has folded you into its design, made you both the subject and the object, the reader and the read. Calvino published this labyrinthine work in 1979, and it proceeds by a series of interrupted beginnings: ten novels that break off at the moment of highest tension, each in a different genre and style, each abandoned just as the story takes hold. The frame follows a Reader and an Other Reader pursuing the missing continuations through bookshops, publishers, and conspiracies of literary fraud. The pleasure is not resolution but appetite, the perpetual first chapter, the desire that precedes every story. Calvino understood that what we love most in reading is the act of beginning.