“Mikhail Bakhtin, one of my favorite literary theorists, wrote that the novel is the world’s most capacious literary form—the one that can accommodate the most kinds of language, including essayistic, confessional, lyrical, even journalistic discourse. Because I share his view of the novel as a composite and evolving form that absorbs everything around it, I don’t feel that it’s such a drastic turn for a nonfiction writer to switch to the novel.” Elif Batuman on Writing Fiction vs. Nonfiction https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/fiction-this-week-elif-batuman-2017-01-23