Word: fictions
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...where our fake headlines are metajokes in the Onion or skewering irony on The Daily Show. It's actually a sign of progress for a society to go from inventing gods and monsters to seeking catharsis in the real life of Paris Hilton. We no longer need to conflate fiction and nonfiction to explain our world. Our fabulists aren't celebrated; Stephen Glass, JT LeRoy and James Frey are quickly caught and shamed. We decided to stop suspending our disbelief for the sake of enjoyment...
...year, the nine-story radar that sits atop a self-propelled Norwegian oil platform has been coming and going from Pearl Harbor for fixes and tests - a delay critics see as symptomatic of an agency under pressure to deliver a national missile defense system that is still more fiction than fact...
...themes and his audience have also kept him young. Ian Buruma writes that Murakami's fiction expresses "a general breaking away from family dependence, and the often lonely, fragmentary attempts by young people to choose their own way of living." You can tell that Murakami is quietly pleased by the kind of age-group such work attracts. "The sons and daughters of my friends are reading my books, and they call and ask if they can meet me," he says, bemused. "And they're surprised to discover the author is the same age as their parents...
...plans on writing until 80 at least - expect his global readership to follow, even for reasons they can't quite articulate. Murakami, John Updike writes, "is a tender painter of negative spaces." Perhaps that ability to finger the ineffable is what finally explains his global appeal. "When I write fiction, I go down to the dark places," says Murakami. What could be more universal than the nameless stuff of our deepest dreams? Murakami doesn't illuminate the darkness - he lets symbols be - but with the company of his voice, we don't face it alone...
...from both countries has attempted a similar bit of serendipity, this time to help revive the corpse of Franco-American understanding. As You Were Saying, a slim volume dreamed up by French and U.S. cultural mandarins and published by America's Dalkey Archive Press, contains seven works of short fiction - or twice that many, depending on how you count. Seven prominent French authors were asked to contribute the beginnings of a story. Each tale was then given to an American writer to complete, revise or otherwise respond...