Syllabi July 7, 2011

Pretty much every fiction writer has had their readers guess (and ask) what real events inspired them. Some writers complicate that guessing game by inserting their actual names into their work. Roberto Bolaño and Paul Auster have made cameo appearances in their books the way Hitchcock walked through his movies. J. M. Coetzee spends his most recent novel Summertime getting eviscerated by fictional representations of women he knew in the early ’80s. Philip Roth casts two “Philip Roths” in Operation Shylock. While “David Wallace, age forty, SS. No. 975-04-2012,” announces sixty-odd pages into The Pale King that “this book is