Hence "fantastical nonsense" and not "fantastical"?

Ah, I get it now. Fantastical nonsense also refers to the crap written in a book by cliché authors. Sorry, I misunderstood you.

The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays
by John Dewey

C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image, developed from his lectures on medieval literature. It's quite good. He does a good job capturing the sense in which manuscripts we to the medieval a bit like what mainstream science is to us (we might allow that the latter is a better means of discovering truth of course!)

"Lucan and Cicero said it, it must be true and we need to work it in somewhere."

Here is a particularly poignant passage.

The daemons are 'between' us and the gods not only locally and materially but qualitatively as well. Like the impassible gods, they are immortal: like mortal men, they are passible (xiii). Some of them, before they became daemons, lived in terrestrial bodies; were in fact men. That is why Pompey saw Semidei Manes, demigod-ghosts, in the airy region. But this is not true of all daemons. Some, such as Sleep and Love, were never human. From this class an individual daemon (or genius, the standard Latin translation of daemon) is allotted to each human being as his ' witness and guardian' through life (xvi).It would detain us too long here to trace the steps whereby a man's genius, from being an invisible, personal, and external attendant, became his true self, and then his cast of mind, and finally (among the Romantics) his literary or artistic gifts. To understand this process fully would be to grasp that great movement of internalisation, and that consequent aggrandisement of man and desiccation of the outer universe, in which the psychological history of the West has so largely consisted.

Lewis is a keen observer of the same phenomenon Charles Taylor looks at. Although, I think the move is more bi-polar than they let on. Man becomes the sui generis source of all meaning even as all reality (as opposed to appearance) is shifted over to the "world" side of the ledger and man reduced to a mechanistic automaton from the "perspective of the really real." Kant's attempt to save God and free will by casting them into the noumena at the end of the Prolegomena is a sort of rear-guard action on this front. So, man is aggrandized even as he is abased. He is finally freed by some 20th century thinkers, only to have this freedom debased into vacuous, indeterminant potency.

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

African literature is unique and pure. Gurnah only focuses on Tanzania and Zanzibar, because these are the places where he was born and raised before moving to London.
I read 'Paradise' the last year and it was outstanding. What I've read thus far, seems to have the same narrative line. A group of helpless young people who had the bad (or good) luck—depending on how we interpret it—of experiencing the beginning of African decolonisation.

I always recommend reading Gurnah. A deserved Nobel laureate and a nice person.

Rethinking Marxist Approaches to Transition: A Theory of Temporal Dislocation by Onur Acaroglu

A Harlot High and Low
Honoré de Balzac