on the representations of the afterlife in American cinema; and several of the selections here link up with earlier thematics such as surrealism. The Reader is an overview that touches upon various poetic and sociological topics, and provides in one place important statements on science, especially ?A New Plea for Diagonal Science? of the final section,? as well as the early psychoanalytic writings and related texts that develop Caillois?s interest in the disappearance of subjectivity. We found the Reader useful for bringing Caillois?s reflections on science into chronological focus, even though one needs to dredge salient concepts from here and there in select essays, for example to find his method of combining the scientific and the poetic in such concepts as inverted anthropomorphism and objective lyricism. There are many Caillois?s hinted at in Frank?s Reader . This is both a strength and weakness; the former because of the avenues and identities that are fragmentarily evoked; the latter because it is still difficult to escape the channeling of interpretation by the axes of surrealism and literary theory (especially the reduction to metaphor that Bataille?s work has suffered), even if the latter is open to some degree to sociological theory. Yet this Reader?s greatest use would be as a field through which one could plot a route of one?s own toward a specific Caillois. One might regain Caillois as an amateur entomologist. In his studies of mimesis Caillois drew upon an impressive literature of naturalist, zoological and biological material in order to