The Truth and Other Stories

Ursula K. Le Guin, Thomas M. Disch, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and Stanisław Lem.

those who were dancing and singing, and the only thing that put him off a bit, or even made him anxious, was the strange business with food, as they called it, the various liquids and bits of stuff they crumbled in their heads, down below, thoroughly, at length, and when it was all wet and shredded, they sucked it in. Yes, that was incomprehensible

Literature creates meaning, and meaning is crucial to the human project as such. Although literature creates meaning indirectly, and by symbolic means, so do all the rest of our meaning-generating systems, functioning as they do by way of representations. Literature is the most fine-grained and particular of the meaning-making systems, and is there