Plenty of novels—modern novels especially—qualify as “container fiction.” But few interpret Le Guin’s theory literally, as Ives does in Life Is Everywhere. The author saddles her protagonist, Erin Adamo, a literature doctoral candidate moonlighting as a fiction writer, with a physical bag that contains material from three books—two of which are Erin’s own manuscripts, the other her professor’s dissertation—a page belonging to her advisor, and an unpaid utility bill.
