Is Fiction the Art of Living?

October 8, 2010

From the New York Times archives, a 1984 essay “Is Fiction the Art of Living?” by recently announced Nobel Prize winner Mario Varga Llosa: “In fact, novels do lie – they can’t help doing so – but that’s only one part of the story.”

is an associate editor for The Millions. She works for the New York Civil Liberties Union, the NY Chapter of the ACLU. She was formerly a writer for The Atlantic's news website The Wire, and a co-editor of NY media blog FishbowlNY. Her writing has appeared in The Millions, TheAtlantic.com, Newsday, National Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, and is partly collected at her website, TheCivilWriter.com. Follow @ujalasehgal.