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Living by Fiction

Page 16

by Annie Dillard


  Hemingway, Ernest,

  Green Hills of Africa,

  Hertz, Neil H.,

  Hess, Thomas B.,

  Hjorstberg, William,

  Hollins Critic,

  Homer,

  Horgan, Paul,

  Howes, Barbara,The Eye of the Heart ,

  Hughes, Richard,

  Hugo, Victor,

  Hunger, Knut Hamsun,

  Huxley, Aldous,

  In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin,

  Jakobson, Roman,

  James, Henry,

  James, William,

  Jaynes, Julian,

  Jeans, Sir James,

  Johnson, Diane,

  Johnson, Samuel,

  Joyce, James,

  “The Dead,”

  Dubliners,

  Finnegans Wake,

  Ulysses,

  Jung, Carl Gustav,

  Kafka, Franz,

  The Castle,

  Kandinsky, Wassily,

  Kant, Immanuel,

  Keats, John,

  Kepler, Johannes,

  Kupka, Frank,

  Landolfi, Tommaso,

  “Week of Sun,”

  Lansing, Alfred,Endurance ,

  La Tour, Georges, de,

  Lee, L. L.,

  Le Guin, Ursula K., “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from theJournal of the Association of Therolinguistics ,”

  Lem, Stanislaw,

  The Cyberiad,

  A Perfect Vacuum,

  Lessing, Doris,

  The Golden Notebook,

  Lévi-Strauss, Claude,

  LeWitt, Sol,

  Lingeman, Richard,

  Linnaeus, Carolus,

  Little Big Man, Thomas Berger,

  London, Jack,

  Lowry, Malcolm,Under the Volcano ,

  Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis,

  Macaulay, Thomas Babington,

  Magritte, René,

  Mailer, Norman,

  The Executioner’s Song,

  The Naked and the Dead,

  Malamud, Bernard,

  Malevich, Kazimir,

  Malraux, André,

  The Voices of Silence,

  Malthus, Thomas Robert,

  Mann, Thomas,

  Marx, Karl,

  Mehlman, Jeffrey,

  Melville, Herman,

  The Encantadas,

  Moby-Dick,

  Merwin, W. S.,

  Miller, J. Hillis,

  Milton, John,

  Mondrian, Piet,

  Monet, Claude,

  Morris, Wright,

  Fire Sermon,

  Moses,

  Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, Jr.,

  Murdoch, Iris,

  Musil, Robert,

  Nabokov, Vladimir,

  Ada,

  Despair,

  Lolita,

  Pale Fire,

  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,

  Speak, Memory,

  Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,

  O’Brien, Flann,

  O’Connor, Flannery,

  O’Hara, John,Appointment in Samarra ,

  Olsen, Tillie,

  Ondaatje, Michael,The Collected Works of Billy the Kid ,

  On the Road, Jack Kerouac,

  Pasternak, Boris,

  Paul, St.,

  Paz, Octavio,

  Peirce, C. S.,

  Penfield, Wilder,

  Pepys, Samuel,Diary ,

  Phillips, Jayne Anne,

  Piaget, Jean,

  Plato,

  Poe, Edgar Allan,

  Pope, Alexander,

  Porter, Katherine Anne,Ship of Fools ,

  Pound, Ezra,

  Powell, Anthony,

  A Dance to the Music of Time,

  Powys, John Cowper,Autobiography ,

  Prinzhorn, Hans,Artistry of the Mentally III ,

  Proust, Marcel,

  Swann’s Way,

  Puig, Manuel,

  Pynchon, Thomas,

  Ransom, John Crowe,

  Rauschenberg, Robert,

  Rembrandt,

  Richardson, Dorothy,

  Richardson, Samuel,Pamela ,

  Rimbaud, Arthur,Illuminations ,

  River Runs Through It, A, Norman MacLean,

  Robbe-Grillet, Alain,

  In the Labyrinth,

  The Voyeur,

  Rosenberg, Harold,

  Roth, Philip,The Breast ,

  Ruskin, John,

  Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de,Wind, Sand and Stars ,

  Salinger, J. D.,

  Scholes, Robert,

  Fabulation and Metafiction,

  Structuralism in Literature,

  Schönberg, Arnold,

  Schulz, Bruno,

  Scorza, Manuel,Drums for Rancas ,

  Sebeok, Thomas,

  Selzer, Richard,

  Rituals of Surgery,

  Shakespeare, William,

  King Lear,

  Othello,

  Shattuck, Roger,

  Shaw, George Bernard,

  Simmons, Charles,Wrinkles ,

  Skinner, B. F.,

  Sorrentino, Gilbert,

  Sounder Few, The, ed. by R. H. Dillardet al.,

  Stein, Gertrude,

  Steinbeck, John,

  Stella, Frank,

  Stendhal,

  The Charterhouse of Parma,

  Sterne, Laurence,

  Stevens, Wallace,

  “Comedian as the Letter C,”

  “The Emperor of Ice Cream,”

  Stowe, Harriet Beecher,Uncle Tom’s Cabin ,

  Strand, Mark,

  Sukenick, Ronald,

  Susann, Jacqueline,

  Swann, Jacqueline,

  Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck,

  Tate, Allen,

  “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens,

  Thomas, Dylan,

  Thomas, Lewis,

  Thoreau, Henry David,

  Walden,

  Tolstoy, Leo,

  Trollope, Anthony,

  Turgenev, Ivan,

  Tzara, Tristan,

  Under the Net, Iris Murdoch,

  Updike, John,

  The Centaur,

  Valéry, Paul,

  Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann,

  Vendler, Helen,

  Vermeer, Jan,

  Voyage to Arcturus, A, David Lindsay,

  Walcutt, Charles Child,

  Weiss, Paul,

  Welty, Eudora, “Why I Live at the P.O.,”

  Whitman, Walt,

  Wilder, Thornton,The Bridge of San Luis Rey .

  Williams, William Carlos,

  Wilson, Edmund O.,

  Wittgenstein, Ludwig Josef Johann,

  Woiwode, Larry,

  Wölfli, Adolf,

  Woolf, Virginia,

  Wurlitzer, Rudolph,

  Yeats, William B.,

  Zola, Emile,

  Acknowledgments

  I am most especially and fondly grateful to L. L. Lee, Phyllis Rose, Gary Clevidence, and Rose Moss, who encouraged and challenged me so generously; to Ed Rubacha, Joan Jurale, Susan Magovern, Shirley Henn, and Louis Mink, who helped track sources; to the Ossabaw Foundation and Wesleyan University, which granted me time and space; and to Mary Connie Comfort, who fed the cats.

  About the Author

  Annie Dillard is the author of ten other books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner Pilgrim at Tinker Creek , as well as An American Childhood, The Living , and Mornings Like This. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.

  Books by Annie Dillard

  Modern American Memoirs

  The Annie Dillard Reader

  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

  The Maytrees

  For the Time Being

  Mornings
Like This

  The Living

  The Writing Life

  An American Childhood

  Encounters with Chinese Writers

  Teaching a Stone to Talk

  Living by Fiction

  Holy the Firm

  Copyright

  LIVING BY FICTION. Copyright © 1982 by Annie Dillard. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © AUGUST 2007 ISBN: 9780061856532

  Version 08092013

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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  *There are no opposing camps; there is no struggle. Each writer is a one-man camp, unallied and unarmed, a lone bivouac under heaven.

  *This, clearly, would be a religious, even creationist, reading of the universe. Note how it differs from pantheism. It reads the universe as a significant art object, not as part of a stream of being which includes the observer, and not as personal message. Pantheism is not the only meaningful reading of the natural world. One need not find a spirit in each bush and rock for these things to mean. The bush and rock may be, as it were, literary symbols. But of what? If we could only see the first draft, or locate some letters!

  *Incidentally, “Kubla Khan” also raises the question of its own beauty. Why is it so beautiful? Why do otherwise rational people—sober, grouchy, skeptical people—turn soft in the head about “Kubla Khan”? Why is this creepy-crawly, misty, overlandscaped, striving-after-beautiful-effect, water-colorish little portentous poem one of the most beautiful and powerful poems in English?

 

 

 


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