First published 1994
A young American writer arrives on the Greek island of Diblos with his notebook in hand. He records the unfolding events around him while simultaneously trying to shape these same experiences into a novel. His notebook captures everything: thoughts that break off mid-sentence, words crossed out and rewritten, multiple attempts to find the right opening. He approaches his material from different angles, backs away, tries again. The writer struggles with a fundamental question that plagues every novelist: how do you transform lived experience into art? What is real, and what only appears real? As events on Diblos continue to unfold, his notebook becomes both chronicle and workshop, documentation and creation. The boundary between his life and his art blurs until they become inseparable.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, academic
Vibes: intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: art-imitating-life, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Diblos, Greece
Period: 20th-Century
151 pages · Paperback · Dalkey Archive Press