The Windham-Campbell Prize Winner on Works by Frances A. Yates, Vladimir Nabokov, Donald Westlake, and More Memory is my most important tool as a writer. I’m fascinated by how memory works, how it is organized, all the methods that have been developed to increase it and explore it and to summon images from the depths of the past. I write about my own memories and those of other people because that is the history I pursue: the subjective experience of time. * Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory It was pure kismet when, during college, feverish and flying on Robitussin, I had this book drop into my hand at the corner bookstore. Three pages in, I had entered a new continent. By that time Dame Frances had established the idea of theaters of memory—imaginary architectural structures, replete with columns and alcoves and windows, where items can be placed for later recollection. Remembering those items simply involves a mental walk. The idea was first proposed by Cicero and lived on through the hermetic tradition.…