Saul Bellow called distraction one of the great enemies of contemporary life. “Distraction” means everything—from the society of endless entertainment to the ubiquitous harassment of technology—that prevents us from paying sustained and dedicated attention to what is essential. The public’s attention: that is the fiction writer’s greatest prey. To seduce that attention, to manipulate it for a few hours and then let it return, perhaps transformed, to the real world: that is the writer’s goal. Great works of fiction are places of heightened human attention, where nothing that is fundamental has escaped the writer’s mysterious intelligence; as readers, we have the rare privilege of living there for a few moments, of entering a state of intimacy with that attention, of sharing such an intense level of consciousness. We recover or remember those things—ideas, emotions, small or large truths—that are a permanent part of our condition, but which distraction has hidden from our sight.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez, “The Licentiate’s Children”, translated by Phil Klay