Non-literary Fiction, Esther Gabara’s ambitious and deftly executed second monograph, has many merits. Its greatest one may well be the care and insistence with which it invites us to do two things at once: first, to see fiction beyond the realm of the narrative, and second, to keep chipping away at the misleading but still largely ossified opposition between fiction and reality. In Western and westernized thought, and particularly in the long and rich tradition of visual artworks analyzed by Gabara, fictions are as important and fundamental a part of reality as facts. Like facts, fictions play a crucial role in the constitution of the shared sense of truth we have in mind when we appeal (implicitly or explicitly) to the existence of reality. Fictions drive us away from the world as is, and in doing so, they prepare our senses and our imaginations for emergent worlds, worlds that...

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