Yesterday, the protagonist of my series Our Borders asked me to change his name on this website, for privacy reasons. It seemed like an easy thing to do, just Replace All in each of the ten blog posts I have written so far (including the comments), and I’d be done. An hour’s worth of work…
Tag: fact or fiction
Fact or Fiction? Part 3 (Dan Brown)
Bringing fiction to life with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code Something marvelous happened in 2003: the plot of a 15-year old novel became reality. In 1988, Umberto Eco published Foucault’s Pendulum, in which three bored editors at a Milan publishing house—Jacopo Belbo, Casaubon, and Diotallevi—come up with the idea of a global conspiracy that would…
Fact or Fiction? Part 2 (Umberto Eco)
Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and the rewriting of history Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco is one of my favorite novels. I read it first in high school, in Romanian, and then spent countless hours discussing it with my desk-mate and fellow-bookworm Iuliana. I read the novel again in English during my MFA program at…
Fact or Fiction? Part 1 (Jorge Luis Borges)
My one-month old baby doesn’t leave me much time to write, but she lets me read and reflect, at least once in a while. A few days ago I remembered some research I did during my MFA program regarding fiction writers whose work either altered the real world, or who toyed in their writing with…