“How many empty rings spin on the curtain rod?” asks Don DeLillo, the author of Americana and Underworld, of Florence Noiville. “Remember: Anthony Perkins walks towards her, with his crane-like neck and profile. The tip of the knife sticks into the dripping body of Janet Leigh. She grabs onto the shower curtain and pulls it down with her. And all that is left is the knife, the silence and those curtain rings spin around forever. But how many are there? Four, five, more?” It is unexpected, tangential detours like these, an ear for the uncanny and a distilled, bare-boned way of writing, which makes Literary Miniatures by Noiville, author and editor of foreign fiction, Le Monde des Livres, the French paper’s literary supplement, a real delight to read. It’s a slim book of profiles (or ‘portraits’, as she likes to call them) of 28 world-renowned authors, many of them Nobel winners, from Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison and Javier Marias to Mario Vargas Llosa, Kazuo Ishiguro and John Le Carre. Here, the American literary giant DeLillo, 74 at the time of the interview, is awestruck by a video work, 24 Hour Psycho by Douglas Gordon, where Hitchcock’s cult film is slowed to last 24 hours (look it up on YouTube, it’s pretty trippy).