A while back we were talking about ideas like Counterfactual History and Creative NonFiction and blurring of fact and fiction. Christa really liked the book The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.
Today Madeline Raynor over at Mashable.com has written about “15 Captivating Autobiographical Books That Mix Fact and Fiction,” including O’Brien’s book.
http://mashable.com/2014/09/01/autobiographical-fiction/
Christa mentioned Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried in today’s hangout because of his use of Metafiction, or a blend of fact & fiction that promises to be more real than real. Of course you could argue that great fiction has always been a blend of fact & fiction… and perhaps that’s true of “non-fiction” as well. Poor James Frey could have avoided such a scandal if his publisher had just called his memoir A Million Little Pieces, “metafiction.”
The idea of an online book club was floated briefly and a few heads nodded. If we did one, would we want it to be like an F2F book club: go read for a month and then meetup in a Hangout and discuss the book? Or use the asynchronous web to have a .Re/ad site like this .Re/act site where peeps could chime in and interact as they read along. Any preferences?
And do we want to read The Things They Carried? Or any other nominations?
I would prefer F2F if possible. Depending on the size of the group reading the book, we could make it work in a variety of ways.
Here are a couple other books that I’ll throw into the suggestion: The Anxiety of Influence: a Theory of Poetry, by Harold Bloom (inspired by Vanessa’s comments on Michael’s “Chain Reaction” post in Practicebased.Re/search); it was published in 1973.
Pirates and Farmers, Dave Hickey’s new book. I’ve read parts of it, and it’s quintessential Hickey, parts unreadable and parts brilliant. So far, I’ve loved the essay on So Cal artists, “Coping with Paradise” the best, but the essay on biennales is pretty funny and good, too.
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Elizabeth Taylor Swift
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xtaforster 15:04 on 01/09/2014 Permalink |
Thanks for this list, VB! I can use it with my 10th grade class, where I teach not only O’Brien’s semi-autobiographical book, but also Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, too. xo