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“The fiction reader is a nonconformist, a rebel, and the reason for his rebellion and nonconformity is the unbearable straitjacket of human life: the fact that we have only one life -- meaning, there is no other after death -- and also that we have only one life -- meaning, we cannot be more than one person at the same time. "I read fiction," says Philip Roth ... "to be free from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own." Reading fiction is an experience of guided imagination, or perhaps an experience in which another's imagination (an imagination of greater richness, greater penetration, greater associative capacity than ours) leads us by the hand to places where we have not been. We read to leave our attention and our conscience in the hands of someone who will take them to good places, we read to be possessed by that way of knowing the world that is only available through the language of fiction. --from "The Licentiate's Children," translated from the Spanish by Phil Klay.” — Juan Gabriel Vasquez