Ibid: A Life
Ibid: A Life is the third novel by American author Mark Dunn, published in March 2004 by MacAdam/Cage. The book is written almost entirely as endnotes to a larger, nonexistent biography of Jonathan Blashette, a circus performer born with three legs who later makes a fortune in the deodorant business and becomes a well-known philanthropist.
The story is presented as a series of fictional letters between Dunn and his editor. They explain that the only copy of Blashette’s exhaustive biography was destroyed after a bathtub accident, but the endnotes survived. The editor persuades Dunn to publish these endnotes by themselves, letting readers try to reconstruct Blashette’s life from the notes, tangents, and marginal remarks.
The work is often compared to Nabokov’s Pale Fire for its metafictional, note-driven structure. Although commonly described as a novel made up of footnotes, the book itself identifies the material as endnotes.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 09:00 (CET).