Living by Fiction is written for -- and dedicated to -- people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, Garcia Marquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined.

An editor and writer's vivaciously entertaining, and often moving, chronicle of his year-long adventure with fifty great books (and two not-so-great ones)--a true story about reading that reminds us why we should all make time in our lives for books.

Outlining the delights of reading, the author tells of what mass education has done to readers, to taste, to books and to culture. The book covers writers from various countries and old and recently-published books, both well-known and obscure. From the author of "What's Bred in the Bone".

Powys writes about many of the authors you would expect -- Homer, Cervantes, Wordsworth, Dickens -- and a few that you would not -- like Rabelais and Matthew Arnold -- but he never pretends that his choice is somehow eternally objective. "Among books," he writes, "as among people and events, our character is our fate. We can extend the boundaries of ourselves, we can enrich our native roots; but it is a waste of time to struggle to enjoy what we are not destined to enjoy!" (The Occasional Review, 21 April 2011)