From Fragments of an Infinite Memory: My Life with the Internet, a memoir, which will be published in November by New York Review Books. Translated from the French by Peter Behrman de Sinéty.

David Lodge published Small World in 1984. The book, a campus novel, follows a group of academics as they travel the globe attending conferences. But this “small world” isn’t merely that of international university circles—without borders, but strictly for initiates—where scholars debate the merits of structuralism, deconstruction, and old-fashioned literary history. It’s a world linked by telephones and traversed by jet planes. Morris Zapp, one of…