The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of: The Real, the Unreal, and the Maltese Falcon

At the end of the 1941 John Huston filmĀ The Maltese Falcon, based on the Dashiell Hammett novel, Sergeant Tom PolhausĀ asks Sam Spade about the heavy, black statuette of a falcon that was the cause of all the mystery and murder.

“Heavy,” he says. “What is it?”

Our hard boiled detective, Sam Spade, replies, “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.”

maltese-falcon-what-is-it

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The Early History of Metafiction

What are the earliest instances of metafiction, or fiction about fiction? I don’t know much about early Chinese literature, but the story I told of the invention of writing in Hunters, the First Readers to Write a Story could be called metafictional, since it is a story about the invention of writing itself.

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