Barnaby Sandwich rolled out of bed this morning at the crack of dawn—not literally, but for him—and traveled uptown to speak to some high school students about a book he had written. These dozen teenagers, up, like Barnaby, since before any merciful God could have intended, and in receipt of their college acceptance letters, nevertheless managed to keep their eyes open, which is one eye more than Barnaby managed. One of the young men asked Barnaby what year he had graduated from their shared high school, and then noted that he had been in kindergarten in the year named. So do the young flowers dislodge the corpses of their forebears—before falling from the stalk in their turn.

In the afternoon, fortified by an omelet, a brisk walk, and one gill of wheatgrass juice, Barnaby wandered quite by accident into “History and the Truth of Fiction,” a panel in NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall. Colum McCann began the discussion with several quotations on the fictionality of truth—and Brecht’s remark that “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” and which Barnaby wheezily shouted, “Hear, hear!”—and then the participants were off and running. Arthur Japin read from his novel about an African prince raised in Holland, leaning back his head at one point to shout “Kwame Bobo,” the prince’s name. (We think the “Bobo” is for “Boachi,” his second name, but that is only a guess.) Imma Monsó, a Catalan writer who described herself as having moved in her own work from fantasy to autobiography, said—in reference to her most recent and most autobiographical book—“If I changed a little detail, all the story could be false.” But she nonetheless called the book a novel, because it was the product of “a very intensive choice among real facts,” an “interpretation of real facts,” and suggested that it is “an effort with the language” which distinguishes fiction.

Michael Wallner, a German writer, mentioned the German word for literature, dichtung, and defined it literally as a “making dense,” and suggested that a writer who has made his subject dense enough—perhaps a better translation would be “compressed” or “compact” enough—has done well, whether it is truth or fiction. Barnaby, who has not been to the gym in several cosmic cycles, leaned over to the woman next to him and said, “My suit is making a dichtung of me!” She shushed him. Mr. Wallner also remarked that Thomas Mann had not shrunk from killing his beloved grandchild in Doctor Faustus, because it was artistically necessary. Mr. Japin professed himself uninterested in the difference between truth and fiction, while Laila Lalami, a journalist as well as a novelist, exclaimed that it was very important, indeed. “But what,” Barnaby exclaimed to the woman next to him, “do they mean by these terms, exactly? How can we have this conversation without a rigorous definition of terms?” Now the woman beside him poked Barnaby sharply in the belly with a nail file, and that certainly shut him up. Colum McCann mentioned “fatwas” at 2:12 pm, by Barnaby’s watch—in fear of the nail file, Barnaby forbore from pointing out that “fatwa” is a broad category of religious judgment, not only a death threat—and Arthur Japin countered with a reference to Auschwitz at 2:15. The afternoon was a success!

Barnaby hurried up, then, to the event he had meant to attend, a reading at 192 Books called “The World is a Book.” He arrived forty-five minutes early, more or less as Carlo Lucarelli, one of the readers, arrived. The small, shelf-lined, beautiful bookstore was filled with folding chairs arranged in concentric circles around a table with a microphone. Barnaby carefully chose a chair that had a direct sight line to the microphone and was also near the door, so that he could slip out for a very important dermatologist’s appointment without causing a disruption. But as Francine Prose read a list of the readers’ prizes, and then the readers read, more and more people came in, and the bookstore’s owner thoughtfully unfolded more and more chairs, until Barnaby was trapped, with no sight line, and no exit path. He tried to ignore his impending embarrassment and listen.

Lluís-Anton Baulenas began, in slow but steady English first and then in fluid and distinctly beautiful Catalan, a passage about a character’s leaving fascist Spain. It seemed all too relevant—Barnaby broke out in hives, which he began to scratch. Baulenas called Franco’s a “dictatorship run by the meek and irresolute,” a very perceptive remark—what can better explain the fetishizing of violence and dogmatic decisiveness than inner softness and turmoil? He also said, “the dictatorship is hypocritical, and this hypocrisy infects every aspect of life.”

Then Moses Isegawa, whom Barnaby had noticed in his red Yankees cap fending off well-wishers with a reflexive hand before his face, read from his novel Abyssinian Chronicles. He read a section in which his narrator, like him a Ugandan relocated to Holland, described the mostly black ghetto that he first moved into; Isegawa looked attentively at the book that he read from, as if he the words might change if he looked away. (The book was published first in Dutch; Isegawa read in English.) One good line: “The only lesson my landlady seemed to have learned from life was never to turn anyone away.” Barnaby noted this down with the intention of reading it to his own landlady, as dramatically as possible.

Carlo Lucarelli read a short passage of a book in Italian, and then sat beside an American friend who read a longer passage in English. Barnaby enjoyed the Italian, but so far it is Catalan that has caught his fancy: he had never heard it before. Ms. Monsó at NYU had a fascinating accent that Barnaby could not quite make out; and as Mr. Baulenas read, he tried to decide whether Catalan sounded more like Italian or Portuguese—it certainly sounded to his ears more like either of these than like Spanish.

Per Petterson read a passage in which a ten-year-old named Lars accidentally shoots his twin brother Od in the heart; it was careful but strong and very affecting. Barnaby cleared his throat and raised his hand. “Od,” he said. “Wasn’t that the name of the Norse god of skiing, who married the Vanir goddess, what’s-her-name—no, I’m sorry, I mean, whom she wanted to marry, but they told her she could only choose by looking at their legs, and so they all stood behind a curtain—”

“Sir,” Mr. Petterson said politely, “your face seems to be covered with custard,” and this disarmed Barnaby altogether. Mr. Petterson had also bobbed his head with good nature when a woman’s cell phone had rung.

Finally, as Francine Prose was reading an imaginary love letter from Kafka’s fiancée, Barnaby looked at his watch, gritted his teeth, scratched the hives that were still broken out from hearing about fascism, and stood up. “Excuse me,” he muttered, “I’m sorry, pardon me—this guy’s really hard to get an appointment with—pardon me, excuse me.” As he knocked and tripped and tiptoed his way between, through, and around, he knocked over two old women, knocked a beautiful Danish girl in the head with his backpack, pulled off a man’s jacket, and stepped on a small dog, all while Ms. Prose’s voice got louder and louder. Finally when he reached the door he broke the handle, and he may have to attend subsequent events in a false mustache.