Go read this short story about family history and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

Fiction isn’t real life. It’s not meant to be, really, because the form is a reflection. Narratives lie because they make sense out of the nonsense of everyday life; they’re always retroactive. (As Nell Zink wryly observes in her latest piece about translation: real people don’t work backward. “They wish they could live as purposefully as fictional characters constructed around all-consuming psychological motivations, but not enough to change their lives.”) The best fiction — the best narratives — on the other hand, get close enough to the real thing that they feel alive, a living and breathing thing. Which is the feeling I got when I read Jamil Jan Kochai’s phenomenal short story “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” in this…

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