When I teach writing, I stress the immediacy of art to my students. Fiction, I tell them, plays out in the perpetual present, a story making itself anew each time we read or tell it. When we write about a work in the present tense, we focus on what it does, on the ways that it whispers and shouts as we listen to it. With the present tense, we acknowledge that the work is a thing in itself, a subject in the grammatical sense: It is one that acts, albeit one impelled to action by its encounter with the reader. In the process, we maintain the conceit that art has a degree of independent and objective reality, and that, therefore, it can be examined, argued about, and discussed.