"I recently read Alan Hollinghurst's wonderful novel The Line of Beauty, and have had a hard time getting it out of my system. The upper-class British, gay London party scene of the 1980s is about as far from my middle-class American straight suburban existence as it gets, but Hollinghurst writes so vividly that you are swept into it.
"I finished the book on a long train ride, and was forced to crack open another book almost immediately. Without trashing the second book, the transition did bring home to me the difference between fiction and literature. Fiction tells a closed story and literature leads you outside of yourself, like the difference between a well drawn bowl of fruit and a work of art."
-- From Andrea, who listens to WHYY in Philadelphia
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