Description:
Living by Fiction is written for--and dedicated to--people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, Garca Mrquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way in which she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.
Author bio:
Born 1945 as Annie Doak, in Pittsburgh, Pa., Dillard has lived in Bellingham, Wash. and the San Juan Islands of the Pacific Northwest. She received a B.A and an M.A. in English (1968) from Hollins College. She has been adjunct professor of English and Writer in Residence at Wesleyan University and a columnist for the Wilderness Society. Her involvement with nature is reflected in many of her works including Mornings Like This, The Living, Teaching a Stone to Talk, and the 1975 Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her work also has appeared in such periodicals as The Atlantic, Harper's, and The Christian Science Monitor. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and… the National Endowment for the Arts.