Tag: The State of Fiction
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Under the Sway of the Cinematic Imagination
John Freeman, the current editor of Granta, published an essay in last Saturday’s Age that attempted both to commemorate the tenth anniversary of “9/11” and to assess the impact of 9/11 on American literature. It’s a stunning piece of critical oversimplification, beginning with the most reductive possible reading of some unfathomably complex novels:
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Reports of the Death of Fiction Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Readers with a hunger for “socially conscious writing” will turn away from fiction regardless of how “engaged” it is, precisely because it fundamentally remains fiction and because the hunger for “issues” and “reality” precludes a serious toleration of and investment in anything that is by definition not real.
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Fiction Dies. Again.
Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, finds contemporary fiction languishing on life-support and puts forth his diagnosis on the cause of its imminent death.
Infinite Patience 