Alternate histories existed well outside the customary bounds of science fiction, such as Len Deighton's thriller SS-GB (1978), about the grim role of Nazi occupiers in Britain, and Vladimir Nabokov's involved and elegant Ada (1969).
The investigative element of Borges's writing, which excites readers' natural curiosity even as it withholds detective fiction's customary satisfactions, instils a tension in his work that is rare in experimental literature.
She uses the first-person narrative voice customary with autobiographies, but also includes fiction-like elements, told from the perspective of a child that is "artfully recreated by an adult narrator".
In fiction a restrained, objective style became customary, as in the work of Eila Pennanen and Eeva Joenpelto; the latter attracted a wide readership with her Lohja tetralogy, a series of novels situated in her home region, Uusimaa.
WHEN asked to name the influences on my fiction and nonfiction, it's become fairly customary, and perhaps a little pretentious, for me to cite the literary gods Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett and George Orwell.
In the chronology that is appended to each of the nine volumes of the Library of America's edition of Roth's collected fiction, which began publication in 2005, the customary list of books and prizes is expanded and given emotional color by the frequent mention of friends Roth has made over the years.
As is customary in this increasingly popular brand of bite-the-boss fiction, the names (and hair color) have been changed to protect the guilty.
With two quirky coppers from non-English backgrounds and a vivid panoply of a Peterborough (some distance from customary perceptions of the historic cathedral town), this is crime fiction of authority, making some cogent points amid the pulse-racing.
Though Archimboldi's literary career is conjured with Bolaño's customary gestural fulsomeness, "2666" never presents so much as a scrap of the fictional master's fiction.
