Present tense for writing about literature

When writing about a work of literature, you may be tempted to use the past tense. The convention, however, is to describe fictional events in the present tense.

Example sentence with editing. Original sentence: In Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, a child reached for a pomegranate in his mother's garden, and a moment later he was dead, killed by the blast of the atomic bomb. Revised sentence: In Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, a child reaches for a pomegranate in his mother's garden, and a moment later he is dead, killed by the blast of the atomic bomb. Explanation: The past-tense verb 'reached' has been replaced by the present-tense 'reaches'; the past-tense 'was' has been replaced by the present-tense 'is.'