Fighting the Bartleby in me, I write these lines, even if the result is not ideal. This is a book to celebrate the impulse to create. It investigates the deep (and shallow and parallel and unsuspected) reasons for not writting. Why do writers fail do fulfill who they are? Why do they do it sometimes, why do they sometimes end up defining themselves by that denial? Why do some get stuck in the negative shade for so long, some through the rest of their lives? What are the strategies, the shapes, the traps of the literature of no? Vila-Matas does not write an essay. Not in the sense that he presents investigation, classic pieces of research (or pieces of research presented in a classic way). He does something that is, in itself, a reaction to the negative drive - he creates. Case by case, he presents examples of "bartlebies", artists, writers, creators that found ways to stop producing their art and ended up not writing as they could or, usually, not writting at all. Vila-Matas creates a master-piece, he collects examples of a particular kind of fauna, the extreme specimen of the creative type that became paralized. As he presents them, we walk in to the bizarre Zoo in which we too can have our own niche. Maybe all we need is to let procrastination, or a little insecurity take the best of us.