The Fiction Impulse in Nonfiction Criticism

Three literary critics consider the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, literature and criticism. While Sarah Chihaya (Bibliophobia), Andrea Long Chu (Authority), and Jeremy Gordon (See Friendship) immerse themselves in others’ fictions as they work, they must approach these works from another literary tradition, that of literary criticism. But are the novelist’s and critics’ impulses really so different? What kind of boundary between art and criticism should a good critic have? Moderated by Daniel Drake, associate editor at The New York Review of Books.