In one of the wittier moments in Rob Doyle’s latest book—a sprawling account of one man’s quest for meaning in the pharmacological era—the narrator visits the world-renowned Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris. There, among other things, he searches in vain for texts by Maurice Blanchot and Pierre Klossowski, and repositions copies of his own novel to cover the works of rival authors. Observing that the Parisian bookshop is as much a tourist attraction as a place in which to acquire books, he bemoans the many patrons who visit the store solely to be photographed, and who shuffle off with a book or two from ‘usual suspects’ such as ‘Kerouac, Bukowski, Hemingway, and Salinger.’[1]