Stephen Best is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession.

Introduction. Unfit for History  1
Part I. On Thinking Like a Work of Art
1. My Beautiful Elimination  29
2. On Failing to Make the Past Present  63
Part II. A History of Discontinuity
Interstice. A Gossamer Writing  83
3. The History of People Who Did Not Exist  91
4. Rumor in the Archive  107
Acknowledgments  133
Notes  135
Bibliography  173
Index  193