Book excerpt: The wide white page spans eight centuries of writing - from Dante's epic account of Ulysses's last southbound ocean journey to Michael Chabon's writing of a WWII US army base on the ice, in Kavalier and Clay. There is fiction and poetry from nearly a dozen different countries, and genres range from Coleridge's Rime of the ancient mariner, via H.P. Lovecraft's Gothic fantasy and Kim Stanley Robinson future fiction, to the surreal comedy of Monty Python's Scott of the Sahara." --book jacket.