Christopher Castellani: Inventing the Real (July 2018)

Though it seems like a recent phenomenon, the genre of “alt-history”—in which writers fictionalize the lives of real people and/or depict alternate versions of actual events—has roots centuries-deep. Castellani offers a brief survey of the history of alt-history, but its primary goal is to explore the imaginative space the genre offers contemporary fiction writers and poets—among them Laurent Binet and Adrian Matejka— in this so-called “post-truth” era.