A novelist flies to Athens to teach a writing course. People talk to her. She listens. That is the plot, and it reinvented what a novel could be. Cusk published Outline in 2014 after declaring her previous autobiographical mode a dead end. The narrator is almost entirely absent; she exists only as the shape left by other people's stories. The first book of a trilogy that changed contemporary literary fiction's sense of what structure is for.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.