Reality versus fiction is at the heart of the current literary debate. We live in a world of docu-drama, the ‘real life’ story. Works of art, novels, films, are frequently bolstered by reference to the autobiography of the creator, or to underlying ‘fact.’ Where does that leave the imagination? And who gets to define the parameters of ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ anyway? Five writers debate the limits of materialism and realism, in art and literature – and offer a passionate defence of the alchemical imagination in a fact-based world.
Iain Sinclair writes in his luminous introduction, they try to explain their impulse to write ‘by way of personal anecdote, revelation, or hopeful punt in the dark’.
Contents:
Joanna Kavenna – Realia
Gabriel Josipivici – The Work of Art
Benjamin Markovits – The Real Story
Partou Zia – The Notebooks of Eurydice
Anakana Schofield – The Difficult Question
Images:
The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors (The Large Glass) by Richard Hamilton, copyright © Tate, London 2015
Fenced Horizons, 2005, oil on canvas; In Accord II, 2007, oil on canvas; Flowering Rod, 2006, oil on canvas; Self Portrait on Tresco, 2006 by Partou Zia reproduced by kind permission of Art First and Richard Cook
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