From the very beginning, readers are conditioned to focus on the words that appear on the page, their semantic meaning and the larger architecture of plot and theme to which they give rise. It is not often that writers ask us to look away from the text proper, to consider what is possible within the margins of a literary work, or even within the small spaces between the words themselves. Yet three recent books of lyric nonfiction envision this negative space as an opportunity to leave some things unsaid within the work, suggesting possibilities more powerfully than exposition ever could.
