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Today is my last day blogging, and I would like to say thanks to everyone at Powell's for asking me to participate. Somehow I managed to blog about
kittens,
Cool Whip, and
Coleridge this week. I am a little impressed with myself.
To wrap things up, I want to offer a list of books that taught me how to have fun in fiction and get away with it. The Getting Away With It piece is important because to get away with writing anything, Play must be taken seriously (some confuse experimenting in fiction with writing "experimental fiction"; a weird, false phrase that sticks to the roof of my mouth every time I say it ? Friday also is, apparently, "Jess Gets Opinions Day" at Powell's Blog ? but there are hundreds of stories that one could call "experimental" for one reason or another, certainly based on the time/place in which they were written ? and yet now have secured a place in our large and sticky canon).
And so, for my last, briefest entry, I want to recommend a short list of books (mostly novels) that have best shown me how experiment, play, and get away with it ? stories that, to me, at once perform magnificent feats of imagination while at the same time reveal something deeper about ourselves that the real world could never show:
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Thank you, Powell's Books.
It's been fun.
[Powell's Books: Thank you, Jessica! We had fun, too.]