Jukka Mikkonen (Tampere): The Realistic Fallacy, or: The Conception of Literary Narrative Fiction in Analytic Aesthetics. The vestigial tale: In our modern click-and-skim world, there's dwindling time and space for the expertly crafted narrative. What's the role of fiction in a world gone completely berserk? From PEN America, Albert Mobilio, Benjamin Anastas, Nadeem Aslam, Brian Evenson, and Jan Kjaerstad discuss religious faith and its relationship to fiction (and from Bookforum, God, Living is Enormous: How might the novelist reconcile fiction and faith — make-believe and must-believe?). From Dappled Things, an interview with John C. Wright on "the soul of sci-fi". A review of Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward. John Gray reviews The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick. The future that had arrived: While popularly known as a writer of science fiction, the late J. G. Ballard was a veritable philosopher of contemporary culture. From LRB, Frank Kermode reviews William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies by John Carey. Despair and hope: A review of There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. On the new Russian realism: An interview with Jeff Parker and Mikhail Iossel, editors of Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia. In the Shadow of the Patriarch: Enrique Krauze on Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the demons of his time. The name of this land is Hell: An article on Mexico in literature.
