Seven books that blur the boundary between fact and fiction

Meg Charlton is a writer based in New York City. Her debut novel Voyagers is now out from Harper. Other work has appeared in The Yale Review, Slate, Lux, Atlas Obscura, and Vice, and the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us. Her writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and covered in Indiewire, Above the Law, and Australian National Radio's Future Tense. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brooklyn College and teaches at Sackett Street Writers.

At Electric Lit Charleton tagged seven books that "live in that borderland of uncertainty, peering over the edge of consensus reality into the irresolvable." One title on the list:

Beings by Ilana Masad

A nesting doll of a book, concerned with the stories we tell about aliens and the moral responsibilities of storytelling itself. The three plotlines in Beings all circle questions of fact and fiction: The first follows Betty and Barney Hill, real American abductees, but speculates on their inner lives; the second concerns a fictional sci-fi writer, but presents her through the authority of letters and archival documentation; and the third takes us to the archivist themself, who is being hounded by an overeager documentary producer about a childhood UFO sighting. These three worlds overlap in ways I did not see coming, calling attention to the constructed nature of all stories. We try to document our lives, to fact check our own memories, to keep careful records we (or others) can come back to later. But there will always be a gap, some terra incognita, whether we are trying to remember our lives or imagine our way into the lives of others.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue