As the artist-writer Peter Mendelsund11 emphasized, what we “see” when we are reading helps us to co-create images with the author or sometimes, as in some fiction, through the author’s surrogate. It is similarly the case for the voice of the narrator we hear in both fiction and nonfiction. As one novelist describes this handoff, “Open a book and a voice speaks.12 A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.”
