One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present, including Sigmund Freud, C.P. Cavafy, W.G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa. From meditations on subway poetry to portraits of such cities as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, this "resplendent collection from a writer who never disappoints" (Kirkus Reviews) is a deep reflection on the imagination's power to forge a zone outside of time's hold.

"Aciman is, quite simply, one of the finest essayists of the last hundred years."—LA Review of Books