Truther Narratives

~ Olga Zilberbourg

by Tamim Ansary

The latest book by Tamim Ansary, former moderator and beloved leader of the San Francisco Writers Workshop, TRUTHER NARRATIVES: CONSPIRACY THEORY EXPLAINED. WHAT IT IS, HOW IT FORMS, WHY IT SPREADS is a long-form essay which uses conspiracy theory as a lens for looking at a larger issue—the way narrative shapes our experience of social reality and how this impacts and is impacted by culture and history. 

It begins by asking a simple question: what do we mean by conspiracy theory? How does this type of story differ from narratives about real conspiracies (which after all do occur at times)? The search for answers takes the inquiry into psychology, evolutionary biology, social sciences, cultural analysis, and history. Conspiracy theory emerges from this inquiry as a particular type of narrative. The book refers to this underlying template as the Truther Narrative.

A literary critic would recognize a truther narrative as a story built around an archetypal mythic structure: one that all conspiracy theories tend to evoke in common, whatever their surface differences might be. The book spotlights instances in history when this narrative has burgeoned, and has fed movements, and it explores those historical episodes for ideas about why the Truther Narrative seems to be surging in our time and how we as a society might respond to it.

Buy the book here.

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Published by Olga Zilberbourg

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also dives into topics of bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Anthony Marra called it “…a book of succinct abundance, dazzling in its particulars, expansive in its scope,” and Karen Bender said, “Olga Zilberbourg is a writer to read right now.” Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in World Literature Today, The Believer, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California. She has published four collections of stories in Russia, including most recent Задержи дыхание [Hold Your Breath] from Vremya Press. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.

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