Word: fictions
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When a spot of light hits our retina at its blind spot (where there aren't any photoreceptors), our brain fills that part of our visual field by extrapolation. We usually don't even notice. Literature can do the same thing. Non-fiction is constrained by facts. Facts are easily manipulated and never paint a full picture of a person or an event. There are too many blind spots, too many hidden motives. Fiction, by contrast, can fill in the gaps between the facts. It necessarily presents an impression, an over-arching framework that selects certain facts and disregards others...
...title. The term Viking (possibly from the Old Norse vik, meaning bay) refers properly only to men who went on raids. All Vikings were Norse, but not all Norse were Vikings--and those who were did their viking only part time. Vikings didn't wear horned helmets (a fiction probably created for 19th century opera). And while rape and pillage were part of the agenda, they were a small part of Norse life...
...Roth has not lost one ampere of his power to rile and surprise. When Alexander Portnoy, David Kepesh (The Professor of Desire) and Zuckerman writhed between desire and conscience, the psychoanalytic model was turned into serious comic fiction...
...think the American atmosphere, the American imagination (news, movies, books, music, fact, fiction, entertainment, culture, life in the streets, zeitgeist) is now so filled with murder and violence (gang wars, random shootings not just in housing projects but in offices and malls and schools) that violence of any kind - including solemn execution - has become merely a part of our cultural routine and joins, in our minds, the passing parade of stupidity/psychosis/chaos/entertainment that Americans seem to like, or have come to deserve. In Freudian terms, the once forceful (and patriarchal) American Superego (arguably including the authority of law, of the presidency...
NOVEL ADVERTISING Bill Fitzhugh's book Cross Dressing, out in June, will be the first work of fiction to contain paid product placement (for Seagram liquor). How might famous works have been changed if other authors had come up with this idea...