Lifespan of a Fact - Softcover

“An enraging, fascinating, singular book.”
- Slate

“More than anything, The Lifespan of a Fact pushes readers to consider not just the possibilities of art, but also its boundaries. It’s as concerned with what we can get away with as whether we should.”
- A.V. Club

“A singularly important meditation on fact and fiction, the imagination and life, fidelity and freedom. Provocative, maddening, and compulsively readable, The Lifespan of a Fact pulses through a forest of detail to illuminate high-stakes, age-old questions about art and ethics―questions to which the book (blessedly!) provides no easy answers.”
- Maggie Nelson

“Thus begins the alternately absorbing and infuriating exercise that is The Lifespan of a Fact, a Talmudically arranged account of the conflict between Jim Fingal, zealous checker, and John D’Agata, nonfiction fabulist.”
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New York Times Magazine

“Genius...In The Lifespan of a Fact, D’Agata and Fingal turn everything around on us until even our most basic assumptions are left unclear...A vivid and reflective meditation on the nature of nonfiction as literary art.”
- David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“The Lifespan of a Fact might be the most improbably entertaining book ever published.”
- NPR

“A whip-smart, mordantly funny, thought-provoking rumination on journalistic responsibility and literary license.”
- Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Less a book than a knock-down, drag-out fight between two tenacious combatants over questions of truth, belief, history, myth, memory and forgetting.”
- Jennifer McDonald, New York Times Book Review

“The Lifespan of a Fact is remarkable not only as an intellectual adventure, but for its portrayal of the search for these kinds of truths as a conversation. It is a high-stakes exercise not of surety but of anxiety...open to the production of wonder, but equally to that of doubt, frustration, and betrayal.”
- The New Republic

“A fascinating and dramatic power struggle over the intriguing question of what nonfiction should, or can, be.”
- Lydia Davis