H. Porter Abbott is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught for 40 years. His publications include two books on Samuel Beckett (The Fiction of Samuel Beckett and Beckett Writing Beckett: The Author in the Autograph), a book on the diary strategy in fiction (Diary Fiction: Writing as Action) and The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, now in its second edition. In 2001, he edited a double issue of the journal SubStance titled On the Origin of Fictions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. The working title of his current book-in-progress is The Fine Art of Failure: Narrative, Syntax, and the Unknowable.