![]() ![]() I’m reviewing by association: recalling those stories that impacted me the most. Of what? Perhaps of taking responsibility into one’s own hands…which we like to avoid. If its reality includes surrealism, then reality implodes, which is a good thing if it is getting in the way. What makes it beautiful, more than anything else, is its ingenious modeling of reality. But if there is just being, how can we persist in arranging anything, like literature, into hierarchies? I’m puzzled by these issues, but perhaps not confused.īliss Montage by Ling Ma is beautiful literature. ![]() The great chain of being, a medieval concept that there are gradations of being, has been superseded by modernism. If it’s elite literature, I’d call it surrealism. I call fantasy a species of middlebrow literature, maybe with dragons, who I don’t seem to like. How can realism itself be real if there are multiple versions of it? Which is the real realism? Sounds like fantasy. As many, at least, as the authors who write the books. Even realism is a synthetic construct: It depends on a complex of conventions that can’t in themselves be justified as realistic. I prefer realism in literary fiction “because it isn’t real”. ![]()
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