Living by Fiction

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically—even fraudulently—essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." —Los Angeles Times

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticism

Living by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows how contemporary fiction works and why traditional fiction will always move us. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.

Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way in which she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically—even fraudulently—essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." - Los Angeles Times

"Living by Fiction is a stimulating book, one of those in which quality of thought and felicity of prose seem consequences of one another." - New York Times Book Review