Experiments with the "as if" of fiction are often more lively in poetry and criticism and other modes of writing than in weak short stories or novels. Ben Lerner More Quotes by Ben Lerner More Quotes From Ben Lerner I think the anti-intellectualism of a lot of contemporary fiction is a kind of despairing of literature's ability to be anything more than perfectly bound blog posts or transcribed sitcoms. Ben Lerner contemporary-fiction literature thinking Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context. Ben Lerner contemporary-fiction historical past When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body. Ben Lerner octopus order mean I've been building a fiction in part around the Marfa poem since my brief residency there, which has kept it from receding into the past. Ben Lerner building fiction past I wasn't aware I'd write the novel when I wrote the New Yorker story either. And the narration of their construction in 10:04 is fiction, however flickering. Ben Lerner stories writing fiction The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel. Ben Lerner changed novel stories Henry James claim that if you want to be a novelist you should be somebody on whom nothing is lost. Ben Lerner novelists want lost I usually see the word "metafiction" applied to works that draw attention to their own devices, their own artificiality, in order to mock novelistic convention and show the impossibility of capturing a reality external to the text or whatever. Ben Lerner attention order reality
