But wounded again by the harsh reception to "Jude the Obscure" — the Bishop of Wakefield prominently tossed his copy into the fire — Hardy abandoned fiction for his first love, poetry, to express, as he said, "ideas and emotions which run counter to the inert crystallized opinion".
Tudor England is a sure-fire winner in fiction terms.
Yet at its best travel writing beats fiction, firing the imagination with tales of foreign peoples drawn close by our common humanity.
Rather than reflecting and refracting each other (think how the twin stories of Ali Smith's How to Be Both twine around each other, barely touching but flaming with life and insight every time they do; or the sharp mirror fragments of Nabokov's Pale Fire, where the fictions of the poem and the commentary slice into each other), the two stories simply duplicate.
I told the lead thug, a man assigned to me by al-Tai'ee a few days before the war as my "minder," and whom I knew to be from the Mukhabarat, Saddam's secret police, that his name was known to my editors in New York (true) and that if anything happened to me, they'd pass his name to the Pentagon and he'd end up in front of an American firing squad (pure fiction).
The bullet holes already present in the wall before the shots are fired in "Pulp Fiction".
Last December, Vice published Paul's "The Parable of Wood and Fire" in our annual Fiction Issue.
McCann's own transatlantic journey came when he was 18, fired up on the fiction of Ginsberg, Kerouac and Ferlinghetti – "young man's literature", he says.
OK, let's do it!'" We often forget that before exploding into the public consciousness in 1994, aged 45, as Pulp Fiction's fire-and-brimstone-spewing hitman Jules, that Jackson was a well-regarded New York stage actor.
Under Mr. Harmon, a creator of "The Sarah Silverman Program," "Community" evolved over its first three seasons from a show about the mismatched members of a college study group to a rapid-fire satire of science fiction, alternate realities and paintball contests gone awry.
