'Long Live The Novelist's Task'

"We need fiction to stretch our world," wrote Susan Sontag in one of her last essays, collected in At The Same Time, published this month: "A great writer of fiction both creates - through acts of imagination, through language that feels inevitable, through vivid forms - a new world, a world that is unique, individual; and responds to a world, the world the writer shares with other people but is unknown or mis-known by still more people, confined in their worlds: call that history, society, what you will." (The collection is reviewed by Pankaj Mishra, with typical gravitas, in The New York Times; he ends on this insightful note: "...the melancholy and occasional bitter wisdom of her last writings appear to be of a mature and passionately engaged American rather than of a marginal and jaded European sensibility.")