John D’Agata is a cross-dressing smooth jazz saxophonist who dabbles in the occult. Actually, I made up those details, but they make for a better story.
That is basically the defense mounted by D’Agata, a writer of creative quasi-fiction, when he is confronted by fact-checker Jim Fingal in the course of preparing D’Agata’s work for publication in The Believer. Precise and unflappable, Fingal, the literalist, forces D’Agata, the literati, into a hot debate about the nature of art and truth in The Lifespan of a Fact.