The Backstage of Memory is an adventure in literature, ideas, work, and the places where great writers and thinkers lived; a fascinating panorama and at the same time a spiritual autobiography.

Following the mnemonic rule of positions and images, Anastasios Vistonitis, through purely narrative means, brings to the forefront the life and work of the leading authors of dystopia: Huxley, Orwell, Koestler, Zamyatin, and Bradbury; he records his visits to the places where great writers like Leo Tolstoy, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Victor Serge lived and wrote;

he gives us the portrait of leading thinkers who have marked our era: George Steiner, Michel Foucault, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, and others; he recalls the adventure of first-rate authors who were the "black sheep" of literature: Ezra Pound, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ba Jin, and Alexander Fadeev;

he presents the topography of literature and the major movements that shaped it in the 20th century; and furthermore, the personal relationship of the author with his publisher.