Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “First sentences are doors to worlds.” With this in mind, what might literature, in our case fiction, reveal to us, reveal about us, and reveal about our culture? We will engage the techniques and practices of reading and enjoying literature in order to explore and articulate how literature *makes* the world we live in. In other words, our understandings of peoples and places, as well as the intersections of cultural and social markers like race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and power can be excavated through the analysis of the fictions we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about various literatures and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the culture and the world around us. Texts may include in whole or in excerpt Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, Don Delillo, Toni Morrison, David Gerrold, and J.K. Rowling.