"The world is full of fictional characters looking for their stories," the photographer Diane Arbus wrote.
Cornell's art could even be called, in its entirety, a great American novel, for it is full of fictional characters like the child inventor Berenice, as well as real ones including King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
In creating my novel's mother-character, I wanted to take the Truths of what I know as a parent and apply them to a world full of other fictional truths — feelings I don't actually feel but have observed.
Some of the more factual sections flag (such as those describing the Italian campaign in the Second World War), but in the early, imaginative parts the narrative is full of pungent fictional details, like Vita in her boarding house making artificial flowers, and Diamante loading bodies on a cart at a funeral parlor and measuring them for coffins.
Imagine Charlie's surprise when she discovers the party really *is* full of the fictional characters and the heartthrobs of yesteryear she's always adored (think: Prince Charming, Humphrey Bogart, Romeo, James Dean, and more!).
The folklore of America is full of tall tales, fictional people in real places, poems and songs that send a shiver or a thrill, mixtures of fact and fantasy, all born of a restless movement ever westward.
My Twitter feed was suddenly full of references to the fictional pooch in the 1997 movie "Air Bud"; pictures of the U.M.B.C. mascot, True Grit; and images of real-life retrievers — goldens, labs, various doodles — all being very good dogs.
His book is full of artists, real and fictional, who eschew convention: from Emily Dickinson and the film-makers of the Polish New Wave, to Jean's niece who "wasn't interested in representing people or everyday objects", and Laurits, who "despised plot, hated suspense, the lie of it, the clumsiness of the artifice".
This fictional memoir, full of compromises and regrets, is also a memoir, of sorts, of Le Carré's own difficult childhood.
Steal this: "In January last year, the Vatican issued an official statement reminding Dan Brown readers that the books are largely fictional and full of historically unverifiable information".
For her rich ensemble novel "Eight Girls Taking Pictures" (Scribner, $25), Whitney Otto mined the real lives of 20th-century photographers like Imogen Cunningham and Ruth Orkin, creating linked fictional portraits full of glamour and grit.
