In your review of Michael Slater’s Charles Dickens (Yale: Yale University Press, 2009) you wax poetic about Dickens’ imagination as though it is unparalleled in the world of writers (“An Extravagant Imagination,” September 12, 2009). How did he come up with Oliver Twist? An unfathomable mystery! But how did Murasaki Shikibu come up with Genji, Cervantes with don Quixote, or Dostoyevsky with Raskolnikov? Well, they just thought them up when they had nothing better to do! Mind you, Dickens is a writer to be honored, but there are many, many others of his stature. And there are a few writers whose characters really boggle the mind. Oliver Twist requires quite some imagination, no doubt, but surely not an extravagant one. Pace Dickens.