Foreword and acknowledgements

Introduction : Responding to the event
Writing to the moment 
Trauma, history and story
Testimony, essay and fiction
Picturing and naming: from "Still-Life" to The Falling Man

Chapter I : Fragmentation and dissemination
"That was him coming down, the north tower"
Spatio-temporal displacement
Discarded objects and split characters
The post-9/11 confusio linguarum
Narrative, syntactical and morphological reshuffling

Chapter II : Encoding/decoding
"Having two of them is like a comment"
Symmetry and the binary
"Do I stutter?": Don DeLillo's “machine made of words”
Naming and counting: chance operations and oracular writing

Chapter III : Meaning
“Whatever that means”
Crowds, anonymity and simulacra
Negativity: disbelief, de-creation, nonsense and the unnamable
Veiling meaning: surfaces, layers, still lifes and shrouds
Palimpsests

Conclusion : Archiving the excesses of the real

Bibliography

About the author