“Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones. … A few deft lines can conjure perfect examples of untutored rawness (Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine of Charles Portis’s True Grit, has a manuscript entitled “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! … [etc.]“), sublime dullness (“The Purpose of Clothing Is to Keep Us Warm,” in Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s Chronicles of Bustos Domecq) or anything in between. Why write the whole book when you can get so much mileage out of the title alone?”