This daring novel is structured as a series of alphabetical entries, complete with definitions, dates, verbatim dialogue, lists of objects, and cross-references, that the reader can use as he pleases. The dates of various events, given within the entries, carry the narrative forward, so that the reader is made aware of the ultimate fortunes of the characters by means of a multiple, interior chronology.In the book, the author has delineated a literary community whose main points of concentration are New York City, Hoboken, New Jersey, and Provincetown, Massachusetts. The people are familiar enough - bohemians, failed poets, celebrities who maintain ties with their lesser-known peers, and the endless and "artistic and " hangers-on that such communities inevitably attract. What is not so familiar is that the author has contrived not only to write a book that is flashingly funny, he has endowed this community of letters with the bitter addenda that make his humor all the more poignant.The basic story is of the desperate and unhappy love of Tom Jones, a young, aspirant poet, for Sadie Massey, a well-off girl who has flung herself into the several bohemias available to her, and embraced, with equal fervor, drugs, alcohol, art, and sexual promiscuity. Their love affair, and the background of mutual friends and enemies against which it is set, reveals a cross-section of urban artistic life that is limned with a clarity and acuteness that borders on the photographic.Richard Horn is a native New Yorker. Encyclopedia was written over a two-year period when the author lived in Mexico. For the past year he and his wife have been traveling throughout India, and he is well into a second novel based on his Indian experiences.