Writer Directory: A Book of Encounters offers a species of hybrid text, part miniature literary biographies, part figuration and metaphor. Each portrait is thereby not reluctant to assume its own kind of licence. Not least in calling upon the author's working part in the equation. Starting from the fantasy of "meeting" Herman Melville, there follow twenty or so selective encounters with writers of a more subsequent time, our own time. Angles, overlaps, tributes.