"Fiction Sets You Free is an eloquent , impassioned, and compelling defense of the role of literature in history. Berman demonstrates that what makes literature unique is not its reflection of the culture that produced it, but that it provides an alternative to empirical fact, putting forward the possibilities latent in any historical situation. In transcending empiricism, literature is the discourse of the exception, of what might have been rather than what is or was. this is a unique and brilliant book, one that will genuinely alter critical thinking."-Marjorie Perloff, author, Wittgenstein's Ladder and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy