An elderly professor sitting on a park bench is reading a book in ancient Greek, and ripping out and tossing away each page he finishes; a writer who has only six months left to live decides to pass them in squandering and perversions; a woman «poet of the senses» manages to live, write and love only if she can put her name in rhyme; an association of Book Dreamers makes threatening phone calls to budding writers, cautioning them not to write a second novel; a book-therapist changes the life of his patients by prescribing impossible books for them; an association modelled on Alcoholics Anonymous promises to free unlucky poets of their dependence on poetry. Towering over all these characters is the «reviewer of the world» in which many readers will perhaps recognize an unbearable type who lurks in every group of friends. These are some of the sixty-four literary obsessions that make up this collection of short and very short stories about reading and writing. The passion and the illness of literature in lightning fast and paradoxical events, too strange to be false or so true as to induce suspicion, verbal constructions having to do with word epidemics and those who are unable to defend themselves from them. The joy of creation, but also failure and cancellation: Borges, Benedetti Michelangeli, Hemingway, Montale, but also dervishes and Zen monks, amanuenses of late antiquity and critics who are transformed at night into book murderers, without forgetting the unknown but very literary clients who go to the Poets’ Bar in San Zeno sull’Adda, one of whom has even discovered the secret of aphrodisiacal poetry. A little book for refined palates, bibliophiles, or only for all the lovers of words in book form.