What Can Literature Offer Us in These Anxiety Ridden and Uncertain Times?

I think it's important to recognize that there are some things literature cannot offer us. I've noticed especially in the last few years there is often a desire from from readers and from critics that novel should be doing kind of political work. There needs to be room for art to explore moral and political issues without necessarily instructing on them or without sort of actually sort of imagining that it is intervening in them. The pleasure of reading is different maybe from the pleasure of buying a new dress, he says. We have a wonderful long history of activist writers who have used poetry and drama and fiction and essays and memoir to make meaningful political impacts.