Dictionary of the Khazars (1984) – Milorad Pavic
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Much of the novel’s alleged power is embedded in the line, that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last. Of course, through print’s long history, there have been countless strategies to counter the line’s power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic, not to exclude the form’s father, Cervantes himself. But true freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text. –(Robert Coover, 1992) via New York Times [Sept 2005]

Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel is the first novel by Serbian writer Milorad Pavich (Milorad Pavi?), published in 1984.

There is no easily discerned plot in the conventional sense, but the book is based on an historical event generally dated to the last decades of the 8th century or the early 9th century.

Pavic often veers into his own style of playful, somewhat Borgesian fantasy. The novel might be a sort of metafictional false document, as the people and events in the novel are presented as factual.

The novel takes the form of three cross-referenced mini-encyclopedias. Due to its format as a dictionary, the novel may be read in any number of ways, rather than just front to back. This challenges readers to shun passive reading and become active participants in the novel, as they piece together the story from fragmented, and often conflicting, accounts.

The book comes in two different editions, one “Male” and one “Female”, which differ in only a critical paragraph. –Adapted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionary_of_the_Khazars [Oct 2006]

In a recent post at his blog Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp observes that the past is a much bigger place than the present, so it follows that most worthwhile books were published not last week but some time in the previous three millennia. –via The Reading Experience

I totally agree with Patrick Kurp and hold that the same is true for art, films etcetera. I used to call the practice of only dealing with the contemporary the dictatorship of the now and have abandoned it somewhere in the early 1990s. Each man is the bibliographer of his own life and instead of a relentless neophilia, one should look for sensibilities which are one’s own and which may be found in the present, but just as much in the past.

In Defence of Realism (1998 ) – Raymond Tallis
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Book by an unfavourable critic of postmodernism:

In Defence of Realism is a powerful indictment of the fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics that has shrouded much contemporary literary theory and criticism. Raymond Tallis, one of the most important critics of post-Saussurean literary theory in the English-speaking world, examines the reasons often cited by critics and theorists for believing that realism in fiction is impossible and verisimilitude a mere literary “effect.” He trenchantly shows not only that the arguments of critics hostile to realism are invalid, but that even if they were sound, they would apply equally to anti-realist fiction, indeed to all intelligible discourse.

“A bracing counterblast to the post-modernizing gibberish of contemporary literary theory.” — The Spectator

See also: realism in literature