Through its multiple linguistic and textual forms; through the challenges it poses for translators; through its literary functions and the deceptive quises it may assume in contemporary fiction; even through its absence, FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE continues to intrigue researchers in diverse disciplinary fields. The collection brings together authors from various traditions in linguistics, translation studies, and literary narratology. The overall corpus covered by their joint effort ranges form texts written in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian or English to Slovak, Hungarian and Finnish. The emerging interdisciplinary story of FID does not purport to provide a single plot, nor thematic closure, but to raise questions, instigate further inquiry and, if need be, debate in the domains of practical textual analysis as well as theory.