This was still a novel conceit, then.
INTO THICK AIR: Biking to the Bellybutton of Six Continents (Sierra Club, paper, $16.95) starts with a novel conceit: Jim Malusa, a Tucson-based writer and adventurer, decides to travel to the lowest-altitude points on six continents to make an online documentary series for the Discovery Channel.
Musically, they sound much like other indie rock music with the exception that the band adheres to a novel conceit: the Harry Potter books will inspire the lyrics.
Aside from the opening pages, little of Kellas's fake novel appears in "We Are Now Beginning Our Descent," an omission that's probably for the best, since the novel-within-a-novel conceit verges on cliché.
Not a novel lyrical conceit, we grant you and besides, being like oxygen's a bit crap as it only makes up 21% of the air we breathe.
A Son of the Circus (1994), an unevenly received amalgam of crime novel conceits and identity politics set in India, was followed by A Widow for One Year (1998; adapted as the film The Door in the Floor, 2008) and The Fourth Hand (2001).
On the surface, the White Stripes would appear to be as clever and self-aware as any other underground rock act: a novel brother-sister conceit, kitschy outfits reminiscent of 1960's proto-garage acts and the use of just two instruments.
But not so drunk that he couldn't chastise his former secretary for failing to execute a book idea that Lewis had handed him one morning at breakfast: a novel based on the conceit that John Wilkes Booth had escaped capture after assassinating Lincoln and had embarked on a secret life in the American frontier.
He's a narrative conceit in a novel that puts different fundamentalisms into dialectical play.
The lurid soap opera of the gods is great fun, and it might have propelled the book, but Leyner has a bigger vision in mind, and the result is a novel with an inspired formal conceit.
It is a bold conceit for a novel – and an even bolder one in the theatre, given that until the blitz intervenes and begins running backwards, Rebecca Gatward's production is focused on the slow revelation of character rather than an accumulation of incident.
