Fiction: true mythomania or false paranoia?

Imagination is a fertile breeding ground from which the most diverse branches escape. Marie Mangez's and Benjamin Stock's novels, both of which came out at the start of the new literary season, deal with the slippage of fiction into our lives, with quite opposite follies.

Published within a day of each other, the novels by Marie Mangez and Benjamin Stock take up a decisive, if over-exploited, theme in literature: the power and mysteries of fiction. By turns defying reality and emancipating themselves from it, these two books pose the fundamental question not of the role of fiction, but of what it carries in its wake, like a trawler's net cast out to sea, stirring up the bottom and pulling everything in its path. While these texts both explore the boundary between reality and fiction, questioning the mission of invention, they pursue very different goals.