The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump

Louise Erdrich, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Chuck Palahniuk, Gillian Flynn, and Lauren Groff would play with devices (like multiple points of view, unreliable narrators, and intertwining story lines)

fierce concision of Raymond Carver.

All narratives are contingent, Surkov suggests, and all politicians are liars; therefore, the alternative facts put out by the Kremlin (and by Donald Trump) are just as valid as anyone else’s.

Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William

a concerted effort by the Kremlin, stepped up since Putin’s reelection in 2012, to use asymmetrical, nonmilitary means to achieve its goals of weakening the European Union and NATO and undermining faith in globalism and Western democratic liberalism.

Ur-fascism employs “an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax,” Eco added, “in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

People were less interested in whether something was a fact than in whether it was “convenient that it should be believed.”

the traditionalists who “resisted the cultural changes set into motion during the sixties” and “identified with the normative Americanism of the 1950s” seemed to have lost the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s.

lies: “to assert power over truth itself.”