Beyond Life: Dizain des Démiurges

Not quite a novel, Beyond Life is James Branch Cabell's dialogue-essay on the nature of romance and realism in fiction, framed as a fireside conversation that opens onto the imaginary medieval kingdom of Poictesme. It lays out the aesthetic argument, that fiction's business is to gild an unbearable world rather than merely report it, that the following volumes of the Biography of the Life of Manuel go on to dramatize through Manuel's own story. Cabell wrote it after several of the Manuel books were already in print, then placed it first once the series was reordered into its final sequence.