Philosophers have struggled to explain how literary fiction can be such an important source of insight into the human condition. John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world.

Literature is a source of understanding and insight into the human condition. Yet ever since Aristotle, philosophers have struggled to provide a plausible account of how this can be the case. For surely the fictionality - the sheer invented character - of the literary work means that literature concerns itself not with the real world but with other worlds - what are commonly called fictional worlds. How is it, then, that fictions can tell us something of consequence about reality? In Fiction and the Weave of Life, John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and life, and shows that literature's great cultural and cognitive value is inseparable from its fictionality and inventiveness.

In 'Fiction and the Weave of Life', John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world.

"My mother used to weave aaydans, the Marathi generic term for all things made from bamboo. I find that her act of weaving and my act of writing are organically linked. The weave is similar. It is the weave of pain, suffering, and agony that links us." Activist and award-winning writer Urmila Pawar recounts three generations of Dalit women who struggled to overcome the burden of their caste. Dalits, or untouchables, make up India's poorest class. Forbidden from performing anything but the most undesirable and unsanitary duties, for years Dalits were believed to be racially inferior and polluted by nature and were therefore forced to live in isolated communities. Pawar grew up on the rugged Konkan coast, near Mumbai, where the Mahar Dalits were housed in the center of the village so the upper castes could summon them at any time. As Pawar writes, "the community grew up with a sense of perpetual insecurity, fearing that they could be attacked from all four sides in times of conflict. That is why there has always been a tendency in our people to shrink within ourselves like a tortoise and proceed at a snail's pace." Pawar eventually left Konkan for Mumbai, where she fought for Dalit rights and became a major figure in the Dalit literary movement. Though she writes in Marathi, she has found fame in all of India. In this frank and intimate memoir, Pawar not only shares her tireless effort to surmount hideous personal tragedy but also conveys the excitement of an awakening consciousness during a time of profound political and social change.

Essays by William H. Gass.

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