Never before the appearance of film had human perception been engaged in such an all-encompassing way by a single art form. In this ambitious investigation of a little-studied narrative genre, Gavriel Moses explores "the film novel," a literary text in which cinema provides the thematic, formal, psychological, and philosophical centre. Through close readings of works by the major representatives of the genre - Nabokov, Pirandello, Isherwood, West, Fitzgerald, Moravia, Percy, Puig - Moses develops a suggestive theory of novels that integrate film into the narrative structure of their tales. These novels, because of their fascination with the lives of filmmakers or their sensitive appropriation of cinematic storytelling techniques, or both, remain a tangible presence within the repertoire of literary modernism. Offering insightful discussions of Contempt, Lolita, and other film novels later transformed into successful films, Moses shows the depth of the exchange between literature and cinema and the extent to which the way we tell stories with words has been affected by the movies. His book will be of wide interest to literary scholars, film historians, and students of cinema and the novel.