The Tournament of Literary Friends

Today at The Paris Review Daily, I confess my private obsession with tournaments, as well as the dubious but inevitable proposition of looking for friends in fiction. The occasion? A recently completed bracket of 32 characters from literature, with the objective of selecting a favorite fantasy friend. Tournaments of this kind are always a chronicle of individual prejudice, and mine, it turned out, is for an all-night friend, a writer type and ex-pat, and a hell of a good guy.

---