This book, edited by Sandrine Sorlin, is a well-organized first book-length analysis of manipulation through language in fiction, where manipulation is understood as the author's strategic use of linguistic and pragmatic tools to intentionally affect her reader in a specific way. It seeks to take the negative connotation out of sought-for manipulation in fiction, hence called joyous manipulation, by showing how authors skillfully position readers in the text-world to seduce, surprise, or move them, in the editor's words in the introduction, not to exploit them. The book aims to exemplify what the stylistician's job consists of: to give a meticulous, replicable analysis of the ways emotions are controlled by literary acts of communication, unbeknownst to the reader. It adopts both a theory-wise and a method-wise approach to analyze texts in different genres: as such, it aims to be useful to the writer eager to master her linguistic material in this sense. The student of literature is also a potential target reader of this text, which offers rather diversified stylistic analyses applicable to other fictional works.The book is coherently divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the strategies of manipulation of perspectives and representations. In chapter 2, Marina Lambrou utilizes a classic example of metafiction, John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, to explore the effect of unconventional literary techniques authors use to play with, or manipulate, their reader's expectations of plot development and ending. These unconventional literary devices comprise metalepsis, a deliberate transgression between narrative levels, and counterfactuality, the author's offering alternative plot scenarios, and endings that deviate from the expected single trajectory. By using these, the author manipulates the plot, rendering it nonlinear, different from well-known default narrative structures, thus forcing the reader to engage with it at a different, unexpected, more participatory level. In chapter 3, Andrea Macrae analyzes social deixis in literature in Dylan Thomas's poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” An inherent property of words, deixis is also very much grounded in context, which is fundamental for the hearer (or, in literature, the reader) to understand exactly what the speaker (or writer) is pointing at, where the language is oriented. Because literature often involves multiple speaker/writer—addressee/reader relationships, and the reader must constantly reposition himself as he makes sense of the different perspectives chosen by the writer, social deixis is a form of reader manipulation.In chapter 4, Rocío Montoro approaches manipulation in a rather different way. It starts from Henry Green's verbalization of the evolution of his literary practice, that is, the use of bare dialogue and indirectness, cutting description to a minimum (resulting in “oblique dialogue”), and it analyzes to what degree this manifests itself in his last novels, Nothing and Doting. This kind of prose expects readers to make sense of conversations and to constantly infer implicatures: in this sense, by engaging readers this way, Green's prose manipulates them. In chapter 5, Jeremy Scott analyzes the problematic case of homodiegetic narratives (a character is the narrator of both past and present) where the coexistence of diegesis (narrating) and mimesis (thinking) may create a conflict. Diegesis and mimesis may be competing to get the reader's attention, making the storyworld inauthentic, and alienating the reader. It is argued that this conflict may be avoided by establishing “stylistic balance” between the two, which is what Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day does. There, past and present storyworlds intermesh harmoniously: diegesis and mimesis work together, rather than against each other.Part II focuses instead on readers' responses to stylistic manipulation. In chapter 6, Billy Clark investigates readers' interpretative difficulties, raised to different degrees depending on the work of fiction, and their effects. Different novels require readers to carry out inferential processes in different ways, and this, it is argued, affects the reader's experience differently, another form of reader manipulation. Three different novels are compared in this sense: Elif Batuman's The Idiot, Rachel Cusk's Outline, and Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. Comments on the reading experience show that readers expect the author to provide effects that justify the effort put in reading, that is, interpreting, his work. Utilizing J. D. Salinger's short story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Laura Hidalgo-Downing's chapter 7 explores the relation between manipulating textual features by the author of the story, manipulating strategies implemented by the author of postreading questionnaires, and readers' responses to questions about their reaction to unexpected endings. It is argued that there seems to be a distinction between the role of readers, surprised by the story ending, and the role of postreading observers. The latter seem to be able to detect a connection between manipulation devices, genre structures, and story endings—a connection that is instead not as straightforward while reading, anticipating, and expecting. In chapter 8, Sara Whiteley shows the reverse of literary manipulation: the reader's text manipulation for specific purposes, rather than the author's, which proves that manipulation can be multidirectional. The stylistic features of poems like Simon Armitage's “Upon Opening the Chest Freezer” are open to interpretative possibilities, and readers engage with these possibilities whenever they discuss the poem. In this case, far from being passive recipients of manipulation, readers are active, interpreting the poem's metaphors and its conceptualization of a married couple's relationship, both literally and metaphorically. In sum, the poem is discussed—that is, manipulated—for conversational and social purposes: to explore its possibilities, rather than to reach consensus.Finally, part III explores genre-specific and multimodal manipulation. In chapter 9, Catherine Emmott and Marc Alexander investigate the devices Agatha Christie utilizes to control her readers, to allow them to see what she wants them to see—or not to see—and when and how. This chapter focuses mainly on two of her manipulative strategies, which rely on her strong rhetoric: first, crime scene descriptions are carefully manipulated to withhold or underplay crucial information; second, suspects are presented in a way that purposefully misdirects her readers. Christie takes advantage of her readers' cognitive limitations and uses manipulative strategies to prevent them from solving the puzzle ahead of time. In chapter 10, Christiana Gregoriou argues that readers of crime fiction crave, rather than resist, manipulation, knowing that a surprise resolution is in store, and one that will require them to rethink their whole interpretation of the crime. According to her, in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin and Petros Markaris's Zone Defense, the authors either bury or diminish the importance of information, like Christie, thus manipulating their reader's ability to solve the crime before the detective. These techniques rely on clever language use, but this, on the other hand, requires crime fiction translators to be as skillful as the author, despite possible language-specific restrictions, so that the crime game can be re-played identically in the target language. Lastly, in chapter 11, Nina Nørgaard explores manipulation as illusion of verisimilitude in J. J. Abrams and Dough Dorst's novel S. This is achieved not only by verbal means, but also by other semiotic modes (typography, layout, paper, binding, and cover art) which further—try to—manipulate readers into believing that they are reading an old book rather than a contemporary one. The yellowed paper, a library sticker on the spine, or the handwritten notes of two supposedly previous readers in the book margins, are all multimodal reality markers supposed to feed one's suspension of disbelief. However, Nørgaard claims that this extreme level of verisimilitude, employed to construct the meaning of “old library book,” might in fact make readers more aware of its fictionality, sorting the opposite effect.Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction has many good points: it is a comprehensive, cohesive analysis of literary manipulation, and it shows how stylistics is instrumental in exposing manipulating techniques in fiction in numerous ways. Also, it focuses both on production (author's point of view) and on reception (reader's point of view), from which writers will surely benefit, and much of its content is likely to be eye-opening to the novice writer. Turning to partial shortcomings, its chapters provide different reading experiences, and they contribute to the overall purpose as differently. Chapters whose analyses are method based are more reader-friendly, compared to theory-based ones: the latter can be quite dense, with metalanguage and constructs that probably only experts in the field can grasp without an effort. In some of these, the prose feels more writer-based than reader-based: it can be taxing to follow. Its target audience of writers might crave a more hands-on experience, to see how manipulation takes shape with clear examples and analyses, rather abstractions they may struggle with.In sum, this volume thoroughly covers manipulation from varied angles, utilizing contemporary texts in different genres, which could potentially satisfy a large readership. However, a portion of it seems to be written for field experts, more than for would-be writers. Because of this, the book is recommended to dedicated writers eager to learn a lot about literary manipulation, but more specifically to those who do not mind occasional cognitive challenges along the way.