“What does it mean to follow a ghost?” asks Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx. Pursuing this, Coughlan explains why the question of following is always already the question of the ghost or shadow and why therefore the question of following unsettles any sense of an undivided present. This present divided between past and future is understood in terms of the pas (the step or pace that is also no pace) that Derrida tracks through the work of Maurice Blanchot and that, Coughlan argues, finds its way into the novels of Paul Auster also. The self in Auster’s writing, he concludes, cannot be thought without the step not toward the other.