Fiction has been the genre modernity has traditionally used to find new language adequate to the representation of the history being lived in the present. This panel asks four writers who work in publishing and audience participants to discuss whether the novel can still play this role in an era in which the crisis of politics entails the trauma of not being able to speak the unspeakable. The panel asks its participants to discuss whether the traumas of climate change, genocide, permanent war, unchecked inequality, and human caused extinction have led not only to a crisis in the representation of politics but of value itself. Under social conditions in which historical time is also a time of extinction, how can the making, preserving, and sharing of value be articulated and acted upon as a collective project?