contemporary literature review

The 100 best books of the 21st century

Dazzling debut novels, searing polemics, the history of humanity and trailblazing memoirs ... Read our pick of the best books since 2000

• Read an interview with the author of our No 1 book
• Read Ali Smith on Autumn
• Read David Mitchell on Cloud Atlas

I Feel Bad About My Neck

By nora ephron (2006).

Perhaps better known for her screenwriting ( Silkwood , When Harry Met Sally , Heartburn ), Ephron’s brand of smart theatrical humour is on best display in her essays. Confiding and self-deprecating, she has a way of always managing to sound like your best friend – even when writing about her apartment on New York’s Upper West Side. This wildly enjoyable collection includes her droll observations about ageing, vanity – and a scorching appraisal of Bill Clinton. Read the review

Broken Glass

By alain mabanckou (2005), translated by helen stevenson (2009).

The Congolese writer says he was “trying to break the French language” with Broken Glass – a black comedy told by a disgraced teacher without much in the way of full stops or paragraph breaks. As Mabanckou’s unreliable narrator munches his “bicycle chicken” and drinks his red wine, it becomes clear he has the history of Congo-Brazzaville and the whole of French literature in his sights. Read the review

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

By stieg larsson (2005), translated by steven t murray (2008).

Radical journalist Mikael Blomkvist forms an unlikely alliance with troubled young hacker Lisbeth Salander as they follow a trail of murder and malfeasance connected with one of Sweden’s most powerful families in the first novel of the bestselling Millennium trilogy. The high-level intrigue beguiled millions of readers, brought “Scandi noir” to prominence and inspired innumerable copycats. Read the review

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

By jk rowling (2000).

A generation grew up on Rowling’s all-conquering magical fantasies, but countless adults have also been enthralled by her immersive world. Book four, the first of the doorstoppers, marks the point where the series really takes off. The Triwizard Tournament provides pace and tension, and Rowling makes her boy wizard look death in the eye for the first time. Read the review

A Little Life

By hanya yanagihara (2015).

This operatically harrowing American gay melodrama became an unlikely bestseller, and one of the most divisive novels of the century so far. One man’s life is blighted by abuse and its aftermath, but also illuminated by love and friendship. Some readers wept all night, some condemned it as titillating and exploitative, but no one could deny its power. Read the review

Chronicles: Volume One

By bob dylan (2004).

Dylan’s reticence about his personal life is a central part of the singer-songwriter’s brand, so the gaps and omissions in this memoir come as no surprise. The result is both sharp and dreamy, sliding in and out of different phases of Dylan’s career but rooted in his earliest days as a Woody Guthrie wannabe in New York City. Fans are still waiting for volume two. Read the review

The Tipping Point

By malcolm gladwell (2000).

The New Yorker staff writer examines phenomena from shoe sales to crime rates through the lens of epidemiology, reaching his own tipping point, when he became a rock-star intellectual and unleashed a wave of quirky studies of contemporary society. Two decades on, Gladwell is often accused of oversimplification and cherry picking, but his idiosyncratic bestsellers have helped shape 21st-century culture. Read the review

by Nicola Barker (2007)

British fiction’s most anarchic author is as prolific as she is playful, but this freewheeling, visionary epic set around the Thames Gateway is her magnum opus. Barker brings her customary linguistic invention and wild humour to a tale about history’s hold on the present, as contemporary Ashford is haunted by the spirit of a medieval jester. Read the review

by Helen Dunmore (2001)

The Levin family battle against starvation in this novel set during the German siege of Leningrad. Anna digs tank traps and dodges patrols as she scavenges for wood, but the hand of history is hard to escape. Read the review

by M John Harrison (2002)

One of the most underrated prose writers demonstrates the literary firepower of science fiction at its best. Three narrative strands – spanning far-future space opera, contemporary unease and virtual-reality pastiche – are braided together for a breathtaking metaphysical voyage in pursuit of the mystery at the heart of reality. Read the review

by Jenny Erpenbeck (2008), translated by Susan Bernofsky (2010)

A grand house by a lake in the east of Germany is both the setting and main character of Erpenbeck’s third novel. The turbulent waves of 20th-century history crash over it as the house is sold by a Jewish family fleeing the Third Reich, requisitioned by the Russian army, reclaimed by exiles returning from Siberia, and sold again. Read the review

by Lorna Sage (2000)

A Whitbread prizewinning memoir, full of perfectly chosen phrases, that is one of the best accounts of family dysfunction ever written. Sage grew up with her grandparents, who hated each other: he was a drunken philandering vicar; his wife, having found his diaries, blackmailed him and lived in another part of the house. The author gets unwittingly pregnant at 16, yet the story has a happy ending. Read the review

Noughts & Crosses

By malorie blackman (2001).

Set in an alternative Britain, this groundbreaking piece of young adult fiction sees black people, called the Crosses, hold all the power and influence, while the noughts – white people – are marginalised and segregated. The former children’s laureate’s series is a crucial work for explaining racism to young readers.

Priestdaddy

By patricia lockwood (2017).

This may not be the only account of living in a religious household in the American midwest (in her youth, the author joined a group called God’s Gang, where they spoke in tongues), but it is surely the funniest. The author started out as the “poet laureate of Twitter”; her language is brilliant, and she has a completely original mind. Read the review

Adults in the Room

By yanis varoufakis (2017).

This memoir by the leather-jacketed economist of the six months he spent as Greece’s finance minister in 2015 at a time of economic and political crisis has been described as “one of the best political memoirs ever written”. He comes up against the IMF, the European institutions, Wall Street, billionaires and media owners and is told how the system works – as a result, his book is a telling description of modern power. Read the review

The God Delusion

By richard dawkins (2006).

A key text in the days when the “New Atheism” was much talked about, The God Delusion is a hard-hitting attack on religion, full of Dawkins’s confidence that faith produces fanatics and all arguments for God are ridiculous. What the evolutionary biologist lacks in philosophical sophistication, he makes up for in passion, and the book sold in huge numbers. Read the review

The Cost of Living

By deborah levy (2018).

“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want ... ” The second part of Levy’s “living memoir”, in which she leaves her marriage, is a fascinating companion piece to her deep yet playful novels. Feminism, mythology and the daily grind come together for a book that combines emotion and intellect to dazzling effect. Read the review

Tell Me How It Ends

By valeria luiselli (2016), translated by luiselli with lizzie davis (2017).

As the hysteria over immigration to the US began to build in 2015, the Mexican novelist volunteered to work as an interpreter in New York’s federal immigration court. In this powerful series of essays she tells the poignant stories of the children she met, situating them in the wider context of the troubled relationship between the Americas. Read the review

by Neil Gaiman (2002)

From the Sandman comics to his fantasy epic American Gods to Twitter, Gaiman towers over the world of books. But this perfectly achieved children’s novella, in which a plucky young girl enters a parallel world where her “Other Mother” is a spooky copy of her real-life mum, with buttons for eyes, might be his finest hour: a properly scary modern myth which cuts right to the heart of childhood fears and desires. Read the review

by Jim Crace (2013)

Crace is fascinated by the moment when one era gives way to another. Here, it is the enclosure of the commons, a fulcrum of English history, that drives his story of dispossession and displacement. Set in a village without a name, the narrative dramatises what it’s like to see the world you know come to an end, in a severance of the connection between people and land that has deep relevance for our time of climate crisis and forced migration. Read the review

Stories of Your Life and Others

By ted chiang (2002).

Melancholic and transcendent, Chiang’s eight, high-concept sci-fi stories exploring the nature of language, maths, religion and physics racked up numerous awards and a wider audience when ‘Story of Your Life’ was adapted into the 2016 film Arrival . Read the review

The Spirit Level

By richard wilkinson and kate pickett (2009).

An eye-opening study, based on overwhelming evidence, which revealed that among rich countries, the “more equal societies almost always do better” for all. Growth matters less than inequality, the authors argued: whether the issue is life expectancy, infant mortality, crime rates, obesity, literacy or recycling, the Scandinavian countries, say, will always win out over, say, the UK. Read the review

The Fifth Season

By nk jemisin (2015).

Jemisin became the first African American author to win the best novel category at the Hugo awards for her first book in the Broken Earth trilogy. In her intricate and richly imagined far future universe, the world is ending, ripped apart by relentless earthquakes and volcanoes. Against this apocalyptic backdrop she explores urgent questions of power and enslavement through the eyes of three women. “As this genre finally acknowledges that the dreams of the marginalised matter and that all of us have a future,” she said in her acceptance speech, “so will go the world. (Soon, I hope.)”

Signs Preceding the End of the World

By yuri herrera (2009), translated by lisa dillman (2015).

Makina sets off from her village in Mexico with a package from a local gangster and a message for her brother, who has been gone for three years. The story of her crossing to the US examines the blurring of boundaries, the commingling of languages and the blending of identities that complicate the idea of an eventual return. Read the review

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By daniel kahneman (2011).

The Nobel laureate’s unexpected bestseller, on the minutiae of decision-making, divides the brain into two. System One makes judgments quickly, intuitively and automatically, as when a batsman decides whether to cut or pull. System Two is slow, calculated and deliberate, like long division. But psychologist Kahneman argues that, although System Two thinks it is in control, many of our decisions are really made by System One. Read the review

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

By olga tokarczuk (2009), translated by antonia lloyd-jones (2018).

In this existential eco-thriller, a William Blake-obsessed eccentric investigates the murders of men and animals in a remote Polish village. More accessible and focused than Flights , the novel that won Tokarczuk the Man International Booker prize, it is no less profound in its examination of how atavistic male impulses, emboldened by the new rightwing politics of Europe, are endangering people, communities and nature itself. Read the review

Days Without End

By sebastian barry (2016).

In this savagely beautiful novel set during the Indian wars and American civil war, a young Irish boy flees famine-struck Sligo for Missouri. There he finds lifelong companionship with another emigrant, and they join the army on its brutal journey west, laying waste to Indian settlements. Viscerally focused and intense, yet imbued with the grandeur of the landscape, the book explores love, gender and survival with a rare, luminous power. Read the review

Nothing to Envy

By barbara demick (2009).

Los Angeles Times journalist Barbara Demick interviewed around 100 North Korean defectors for this propulsive work of narrative non-fiction, but she focuses on just six, all from the north-eastern city of Chongjin – closed to foreigners and less media-ready than Pyongyang. North Korea is revealed to be rife with poverty, corruption and violence but populated by resilient people with a remarkable ability to see past the propaganda all around them. Read the review

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

By shoshana zuboff (2019).

An agenda-setting book that is devastating about the extent to which big tech sets out to manipulate us for profit. Not simply another expression of the “techlash”, Zuboff’s ambitious study identifies a new form of capitalism, one involving the monitoring and shaping of our behaviour, often without our knowledge, with profound implications for democracy. “Once we searched Google, but now Google searches us.” Read the review

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

By chris ware (2000).

At the time when Ware won the Guardian first book award, no graphic novel had previously won a generalist literary prize. Emotional and artistic complexity are perfectly poised in this account of a listless 36-year-old office dogsbody who is thrown into an existential crisis by an encounter with his estranged dad. Read the review

Notes on a Scandal

By zoë heller (2003).

Sheba, a middle-aged teacher at a London comprehensive, begins an affair with her 15-year-old student - but we hear about it from a fellow teacher, the needy Barbara, whose obsessive nature drives the narrative. With shades of Patricia Highsmith, this teasing investigation into sex, class and loneliness is a dark marvel. Read the review

The Infatuations

By javier marías (2011), translated by margaret jull costa (2013).

The Spanish master examines chance, love and death in the story of an apparently random killing that gradually reveals hidden depths. Marías constructs an elegant murder mystery from his trademark labyrinthine sentences, but this investigation is in pursuit of much meatier questions than whodunnit. Read the review

The Constant Gardener

By john le carré (2001).

The master of the cold war thriller turned his attention to the new world order in this chilling investigation into the corruption powering big pharma in Africa. Based on the case of a rogue antibiotics trial that killed and maimed children in Nigeria in the 1990s, it has all the dash and authority of his earlier novels while precisely and presciently anatomising the dangers of a rampant neo-imperialist capitalism. Read the review

The Silence of the Girls

By pat barker (2018).

If the western literary canon is founded on Homer, then it is founded on women’s silence. Barker’s extraordinary intervention, in which she replays the events of the Iliad from the point of view of the enslaved Trojan women, chimed with both the #MeToo movement and a wider drive to foreground suppressed voices. In a world still at war, it has chilling contemporary resonance. Read the review

Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

By carlo rovelli (2014).

A theoretical physicist opens a window on to the great questions of the universe with this 96-page overview of modern physics. Rovelli’s keen insight and striking metaphors make this the best introduction to subjects including relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, elementary particles and entropy outside of a course in advanced physics. Read the review

by Gillian Flynn (2012)

The deliciously dark US crime thriller that launched a thousand imitators and took the concept of the unreliable narrator to new heights. A woman disappears: we think we know whodunit, but we’re wrong. Flynn’s stylishly written portrait of a toxic marriage set against a backdrop of social and economic insecurity combines psychological depth with sheer unputdownable flair. Read the review

by Stephen King (2000)

Written after a near-fatal accident, this combination of memoir and masterclass by fiction’s most successful modern storyteller showcases the blunt, casual brilliance of King at his best. As well as being genuinely useful, it’s a fascinating chronicle of literary persistence, and of a lifelong love affair with language and narrative. Read the review

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By rebecca skloot (2010).

Henrietta Lacks was a black American who died in agony of cancer in a “coloured” hospital ward in 1951. Her cells, taken without her knowledge during a biopsy, went on to change medical history, being used around the world to develop countless drugs. Skloot skilfully tells the extraordinary scientific story, but in this book the voices of the Lacks children are crucial – they have struggled desperately even as billions have been made from their mother’s “HeLa” cells. Read the review

Mother’s Milk

By edward st aubyn (2006).

The fourth of the autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels finds the wealthy protagonist – whose flight from atrocious memories of child abuse into drug abuse was the focus of the first books – beginning to grope after redemption. Elegant wit and subtle psychology lift grim subject matter into seductive brilliance. Read the review

This House of Grief

By helen garner (2014).

A man drives his three sons into a deep pond and swims out, leaving them to drown. But was it an accident? This 2005 tragedy caught the attention of one of Australia’s greatest living writers. Garner puts herself centre stage in an account of Robert Farquharson’s trial that combines forensic detail and rich humanity. Read the review

by Alice Oswald (2002)

This book-length poem is a mesmerising tapestry of “the river’s mutterings”, based on three years of recording conversations with people who live and work on the River Dart in Devon. From swimmers to sewage workers, boatbuilders to bailiffs, salmon fishers to ferryman, the voices are varied and vividly brought to life. Read the review

The Beauty of the Husband

By anne carson (2002).

One of Canada’s most celebrated poets examines love and desire in a collection that describes itself as “a fictional essay in 39 tangos”. Carson charts the course of a doomed marriage in loose-limbed lines that follow the switchbacks of thought and feeling from first meeting through multiple infidelities to arrive at eventual divorce.

by Tony Judt (2005)

This grand survey of Europe since 1945 begins with the devastation left behind by the second world war and offers a panoramic narrative of the cold war from its beginnings to the collapse of the Soviet bloc – a part of which Judt witnessed firsthand in Czechoslovakia’s velvet revolution. A very complex story is told with page-turning urgency and what may now be read as nostalgic faith in “the European idea”. Read the review

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

By michael chabon (2000).

A love story to the golden age of comics in New York, Chabon’s Pulitzer-winner features two Jewish cousins, one smuggled out of occupied Prague, who create an anti-fascist comic book superhero called The Escapist. Their own adventures are as exciting and highly coloured as the ones they write and draw in this generous, open-hearted, deeply lovable rollercoaster of a book. Read the review

by Robert Macfarlane (2019)

A beautifully written and profound book, which takes the form of a series of (often hair-raising and claustrophobic) voyages underground – from the fjords of the Arctic to the Parisian catacombs. Trips below the surface inspire reflections on “deep” geological time and raise urgent questions about the human impact on planet Earth. Read the review

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

By michael pollan (2006).

An entertaining and highly influential book from the writer best known for his advice: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” The author follows four meals on their journey from field to plate – including one from McDonald’s and a locally sourced organic feast. Pollan is a skilled, amusing storyteller and The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed both food writing and the way we see food. Read the review

Women & Power

By mary beard (2017).

Based on Beard’s lectures on women’s voices and how they have been silenced, Women and Power was an enormous publishing success in the “ #MeToo ”’ year 2017. An exploration of misogyny, the origins of “gendered speech” in the classical era and the problems the male world has with strong women, this slim manifesto became an instant feminist classic. Read the review

True History of the Kelly Gang

By peter carey (2000).

Carey’s second Booker winner is an irresistible tour de force of literary ventriloquism: the supposed autobiography of 19th-century Australian outlaw and “wild colonial boy” Ned Kelly, inspired by a fragment of Kelly’s own prose and written as a glorious rush of semi-punctuated vernacular storytelling. Mythic and tender by turns, these are tall tales from a lost frontier. Read the review

Small Island

By andrea levy (2004).

Pitted against a backdrop of prejudice, this London-set novel is told by four protagonists – Hortense and Gilbert, Jamaican migrants, and a stereotypically English couple, Queenie and Bernard. These varied perspectives, illuminated by love and loyalty, combine to create a thoughtful mosaic depicting the complex beginnings of Britain’s multicultural society. Read the review

by Colm Tóibín (2009)

Tóibín’s sixth novel is set in the 1950s, when more than 400,000 people left Ireland, and considers the emotional and existential impact of emigration on one young woman. Eilis makes a life for herself in New York, but is drawn back by the possibilities of the life she has lost at home. A universal story of love, endurance and missed chances, made radiant through Tóibín’s measured prose and tender understatement. Read the review

Oryx and Crake

By margaret atwood (2003).

In the first book in her dystopian MaddAddam trilogy, the Booker winner speculates about the havoc science can wreak on the world. The big warning here – don’t trust corporations to run the planet – is blaring louder and louder as the century progresses. Read the review

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

By jeanette winterson (2011).

The title is the question Winterson’s adoptive mother asked as she threw her daughter out, aged 16, for having a girlfriend. The autobiographical story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , and the trials of Winterson’s later life, is urgent, wise and moving. Read the review

Night Watch

By terry pratchett (2002).

Pratchett’s mighty Discworld series is a high point in modern fiction: a parody of fantasy literature that deepened and darkened over the decades to create incisive satires of our own world. The 29th book, focusing on unlikely heroes, displays all his fierce intelligence, anger and wild humour, in a story that’s moral, humane – and hilarious. Read the review

by Marjane Satrapi (2000-2003), translated by Mattias Ripa (2003-2004)

Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel follows her coming-of-age in the lead up to and during the Iranian revolution. In this riotous memoir, Satrapi focuses on one young life to reveal a hidden history.

Human Chain

By seamus heaney (2010).

The Nobel laureate tends to the fragments of memory and loss with moving precision in his final poetry collection. A book of elegies and echoes, these poems are infused with a haunting sense of pathos, with a line often left hanging to suspend the reader in longing and regret. Read the review

Levels of Life

By julian barnes (2013).

The British novelist combines fiction and non-fiction to form a searing essay on grief and love for his late wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Barnes divides the book into three parts with disparate themes – 19th-century ballooning, photography and marriage. Their convergence is wonderfully achieved. Read the review

Hope in the Dark

By rebecca solnit (2004).

Writing against “the tremendous despair at the height of the Bush administration’s powers and the outset of the war in Iraq”, the US thinker finds optimism in political activism and its ability to change the world. The book ranges widely from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico, to the invention of Viagra. Read the review

Citizen: An American Lyric

By claudia rankine (2014).

From the slow emergency response in the black suburbs destroyed by hurricane Katrina to a mother trying to move her daughter away from a black passenger on a plane, the poet’s award-winning prose work confronts the history of racism in the US and asks: regardless of their actual status, who truly gets to be a citizen? Read the review

by Michael Lewis (2010)

The author of The Big Short has made a career out of rendering the most opaque subject matter entertaining and comprehensible: Moneyball tells the story of how geeks outsmarted jocks to revolutionise baseball using maths. But you do not need to know or care about the sport, because – as with all Lewis’s best writing – it’s all about how the story is told. Read the review

by Ian McEwan (2001)

There are echoes of DH Lawrence and EM Forster in McEwan’s finely tuned dissection of memory and guilt. The fates of three young people are altered by a young girl’s lie at the close of a sweltering day on a country estate in 1935. Lifelong remorse, the horror of war and devastating twists are to follow in an elegant, deeply felt meditation on the power of love and art. Read the review

The Year of Magical Thinking

By joan didion (2005).

With cold, clear, precise prose, Didion gives an account of the year her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, collapsed from a fatal heart attack in their home. Her devastating examination of grief and widowhood changed the nature of writing about bereavement. Read the review

White Teeth

By zadie smith (2000).

Set around the unlikely bond between two wartime friends, Smith’s debut brilliantly captures Britain’s multicultural spirit, and offers a compelling insight into immigrant family life.

The Line of Beauty

By alan hollinghurst (2004).

Oxford graduate Nick Guest has the questionable good fortune of moving into the grand west London home of a rising Tory MP. Thatcher-era degeneracy is lavishly displayed as Nick falls in love with the son of a supermarket magnate, and the novel records how Aids began to poison gay life in London. In peerless prose, Hollinghurst captures something close to the spirit of an age. Read the review

The Green Road

By anne enright (2015).

A reunion dominates the Irish novelist’s family drama, but the individual stories of the five members of the Madigan clan – the matriarch, Rosaleen, and her children, Dan, Emmet, Constance and Hanna, who escape and are bound to return – are beautifully held in balance. When the Madigans do finally come together halfway through the book, Enright masterfully reminds us of the weight of history and family. Read the review

by Martin Amis (2000)

Known for the firecracker phrases and broad satires of his fiction, Amis presented a much warmer face in his memoir. His life is haunted by the disappearance of his cousin Lucy, who is revealed 20 years later to have been murdered by Fred West. But Amis also has much fun recollecting his “velvet-suited, snakeskin-booted” youth, and paints a moving portrait of his father’s comic gusto as old age reduces him to a kind of “anti-Kingsley”. Read the review

The Hare with Amber Eyes

By edmund de waal (2010).

In this exquisite family memoir, the ceramicist explains how he came to inherit a collection of 264 netsuke – small Japanese ornaments – from his great-uncle. The unlikely survival of the netsuke entails De Waal telling a story that moves from Paris to Austria under the Nazis to Japan, and he beautifully conjures a sense of place. The book doubles as a set of profound reflections on objects and what they mean to us. Read the review

Outline by Rachel

Cusk (2014).

This startling work of autofiction, which signalled a new direction for Cusk, follows an author teaching a creative writing course over one hot summer in Athens. She leads storytelling exercises. She meets other writers for dinner. She hears from other people about relationships, ambition, solitude, intimacy and “the disgust that exists indelibly between men and women”. The end result is sublime. Read the review

by Alison Bechdel (2006)

The American cartoonist’s darkly humorous memoir tells the story of how her closeted gay father killed himself a few months after she came out as a lesbian. This pioneering work, which later became a musical, helped shape the modern genre of “graphic memoir”, combining detailed and beautiful panels with remarkable emotional depth. Read the review

The Emperor of All Maladies

By siddhartha mukherjee (2010).

“Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.” In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina , Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey. Read the review

The Argonauts

By maggie nelson (2015).

An electrifying memoir that captured a moment in thinking about gender, and also changed the world of books. The story, told in fragments, is of Nelson’s pregnancy, which unfolds at the same time as her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is beginning testosterone injections: “the summer of our changing bodies”. Strikingly honest, originally written, with a galaxy of intellectual reference points, it is essentially a love story; one that seems to make a new way of living possible. Read the review

The Underground Railroad

By colson whitehead (2016).

A thrilling, genre-bending tale of escape from slavery in the American deep south, this Pulitzer prize-winner combines extraordinary prose and uncomfortable truths. Two slaves flee their masters using the underground railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped slaves out of the south, wonderfully reimagined by Whitehead as a steampunk vision of a literal train. Read the review

A Death in the Family

By karl ove knausgaard (2009), translated by don bartlett (2012).

The first instalment of Knausgaard’s relentlessly self-examining six-volume series My Struggle revolves around the life and death of his alcoholic father. Whether or not you regard him as the Proust of memoir, his compulsive honesty created a new benchmark for autofiction. Read the review

by Carol Ann Duffy (2005)

A moving, book-length poem from the UK’s first female poet laureate, Rapture won the TS Eliot prize in 2005. From falling in love to betrayal and separation, Duffy reimagines romance with refreshing originality. Read the review

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage

By alice munro (2001).

Canada’s observant and humane short story writer, who won the Nobel in 2013, is at her best in this collection. A housekeeper’s fate is changed by the pranks of her employer’s teenager daughter; an incorrigible flirt gracefully accepts his wife’s new romance in her care home. No character acts as at first expected in Munro’s stories, which are attuned to the tiniest shifts in perception. Read the review

Capital in the Twenty First Century

By thomas piketty (2013), translated by arthur goldhammer (2014).

The beautifully written product of 15 years of research, Capital made its author an intellectual star – the modern Marx – and opened readers’ eyes to how neoliberalism produces vastly increased inequalities. Full of data, theories and historical analysis, its message is clear, and prophetic: unless governments increase tax, the new and grotesque wealth levels of the rich will encourage political instability. Read the review

Normal People

By sally rooney (2018).

Rooney’s second novel, a love story between two clever and damaged young people coming of age in contemporary Ireland, confirmed her status as a literary superstar. Her focus is on the dislocation and uncertainty of millennial life, but her elegant prose has universal appeal. Read the review

A Visit from The Goon Squad

By jennifer egan (2011).

Inspired by both Proust and The Sopranos , Egan’s Pulitzer-winning comedy follows several characters in and around the US music industry, but is really a book about memory and kinship, time and narrative, continuity and disconnection. Read the review

The Noonday Demon

By andrew solomon (2001).

Emerging from Solomon’s own painful experience, this “anatomy” of depression examines its many faces – plus its science, sociology and treatment. The book’s combination of honesty, scholarly rigour and poetry made it a benchmark in literary memoir and understanding of mental health. Read the review

Tenth of December

By george saunders (2013).

This warm yet biting collection of short stories by the Booker-winning American author will restore your faith in humanity. No matter how weird the setting – a futuristic prison lab, a middle-class home where human lawn ornaments are employed as a status symbol – in these surreal satires of post-crash life Saunders reminds us of the meaning we find in small moments. Read the review

by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), translated by Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (2014)

In his Olympian history of humanity, Harari documents the numerous revolutions Homo sapiens has undergone over the last 70,000 years: from new leaps in cognitive reasoning to agriculture, science and industry, the era of information and the possibilities of biotechnology. Harari’s scope may be too wide for some, but this engaging work topped the charts and made millions marvel. Read the review

Life After Life

By kate atkinson (2013).

Atkinson examines family, history and the power of fiction as she tells the story of a woman born in 1910 – and then tells it again, and again, and again. Ursula Todd’s multiple lives see her strangled at birth, drowned on a Cornish beach, trapped in an awful marriage and visiting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But this dizzying fictional construction is grounded by such emotional intelligence that her heroine’s struggles always feel painfully, joyously real. Read the review

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night‑Time

By mark haddon (2003).

Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone becomes absorbed in the mystery of a dog’s demise, meticulously investigating through diagrams, timetables, maps and maths problems. Haddon’s fascinating portrayal of an unconventional mind was a crossover hit with both adults and children and was adapted into a very successful stage play. Read the review

The Shock Doctrine

By naomi klein (2007).

In this urgent examination of free-market fundamentalism, Klein argues – with accompanying reportage – that the social breakdowns witnessed during decades of neoliberal economic policies are not accidental, but in fact integral to the functioning of the free market, which relies on disaster and human suffering to function. Read the review

by Cormac McCarthy (2006)

A father and his young son, “each the other’s world entire”, trawl across the ruins of post-apocalyptic America in this terrifying but tender story told with biblical conviction. The slide into savagery as civilisation collapses is harrowing material, but McCarthy’s metaphysical efforts to imagine a cold dark universe where the light of humanity is winking out are what make the novel such a powerful ecological warning. Read the review

The Corrections

By jonathan franzen (2001).

The members of one ordinarily unhappy American family struggle to adjust to the shifting axes of their worlds over the final decades of the 20th century. Franzen’s move into realism reaped huge literary rewards: exploring both domestic and national conflict, this family saga is clever, funny and outrageously readable. Read the review

The Sixth Extinction

By elizabeth kolbert (2014).

The science journalist examines with clarity and memorable detail the current crisis of plant and animal loss caused by human civilisation (over the past half billion years, there have been five mass extinctions on Earth; we are causing another). Kolbert considers both ecosystems – the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon rainforest – and the lives of some extinct and soon-to-be extinct creatures including the Sumatran rhino and “the most beautiful bird in the world”, the black-faced honeycreeper of Maui. Read the review

Fingersmith

By sarah waters (2002).

Moving from the underworld dens of Victorian London to the boudoirs of country house gothic, and hingeing on the seduction of an heiress, Waters’s third novel is a drippingly atmospheric thriller, a smart study of innocence and experience, and a sensuous lesbian love story – with a plot twist to make the reader gasp. Read the review

Nickel and Dimed

By barbara ehrenreich (2001).

In this modern classic of reportage, Ehrenreich chronicled her attempts to live on the minimum wage in three American states. Working first as a waitress, then a cleaner and a nursing home aide, she still struggled to survive, and the stories of her co-workers are shocking. The US economy as she experienced it is full of routine humiliation, with demands as high as the rewards are low. Two decades on, this still reads like urgent news. Read the review

The Plot Against America

By philip roth (2004).

What if aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once called Hitler “a great man”, had won the US presidency in a landslide victory and signed a treaty with Nazi Germany? Paranoid yet plausible, Roth’s alternative-world novel is only more relevant in the age of Trump. Read the review

My Brilliant Friend

By elena ferrante (2011), translated by ann goldstein (2012).

Powerfully intimate and unashamedly domestic, the first in Ferrante’s Neapolitan series established her as a literary sensation. This and the three novels that followed documented the ways misogyny and violence could determine lives, as well as the history of Italy in the late 20th century.

Half of a Yellow Sun

By chimamanda ngozi adichie (2006).

When Nigerian author Adichie was growing up, the Biafran war “hovered over everything”. Her sweeping, evocative novel, which won the Orange prize, charts the political and personal struggles of those caught up in the conflict and explores the brutal legacy of colonialism in Africa. Read the review

Cloud Atlas

David mitchell (2004).

The epic that made Mitchell’s name is a Russian doll of a book, nesting stories within stories and spanning centuries and genres with aplomb. From a 19th-century seafarer to a tale from beyond the end of civilisation, via 1970s nuclear intrigue and the testimony of a future clone, these dizzying narratives are delicately interlinked, highlighting the echoes and recurrences of the vast human symphony. Read the review

by Ali Smith (2016)

Smith began writing her Seasonal Quartet, a still-ongoing experiment in quickfire publishing, against the background of the EU referendum. The resulting “first Brexit novel” isn’t just a snapshot of a newly divided Britain, but a dazzling exploration into love and art, time and dreams, life and death, all done with her customary invention and wit. Read the review

Between the World and Me

By ta-nehisi coates (2015).

Coates’s impassioned meditation on what it means to be a black American today made him one of the country’s most important intellectuals and writers. Having grown up the son of a former Black Panther on the violent streets of Baltimore, he has a voice that is challenging but also poetic. Between the World and Me takes the form of a letter to his teenage son, and ranges from the daily reality of racial injustice and police violence to the history of slavery and the civil war: white people, he writes, will never remember “the scale of theft that enriched them”. Read the review

The Amber Spyglass

By philip pullman (2000).

Children’s fiction came of age when the final part of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy became the first book for younger readers to win the Whitbread book of the year award. Pullman has brought imaginative fire and storytelling bravado to the weightiest of subjects: religion, free will, totalitarian structures and the human drive to learn, rebel and grow. Here Asriel’s struggle against the Authority reaches its climax, Lyra and Will journey to the Land of the Dead, and Mary investigates the mysterious elementary particles that lend their name to his current trilogy: The Book of Dust. The Hollywood-fuelled commercial success achieved by JK Rowling may have eluded Pullman so far, but his sophisticated reworking of Paradise Lost helped adult readers throw off any embarrassment at enjoying fiction written for children – and publishing has never looked back. Read the review

by WG Sebald (2001), translated by Anthea Bell (2001)

Sebald died in a car crash in 2001, but his genre-defying mix of fact and fiction, keen sense of the moral weight of history and interleaving of inner and outer journeys have had a huge influence on the contemporary literary landscape. His final work, the typically allusive life story of one man, charts the Jewish disapora and lost 20th century with heartbreaking power. Read the review

Never Let Me Go

By kazuo ishiguro (2005).

From his 1989 Booker winner The Remains of the Day to 2015’s The Buried Giant , Nobel laureate Ishiguro writes profound, puzzling allegories about history, nationalism and the individual’s place in a world that is always beyond our understanding. His sixth novel, a love triangle set among human clones in an alternative 1990s England, brings exquisite understatement to its exploration of mortality, loss and what it means to be human. Read the review

Secondhand Time

By svetlana alexievich (2013), translated by bela shayevich (2016).

The Belarusian Nobel laureate recorded thousands of hours of testimony from ordinary people to create this oral history of the Soviet Union and its end. Writers, waiters, doctors, soldiers, former Kremlin apparatchiks, gulag survivors: all are given space to tell their stories, share their anger and betrayal, and voice their worries about the transition to capitalism. An unforgettable book, which is both an act of catharsis and a profound demonstration of empathy.

by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

Robinson’s meditative, deeply philosophical novel is told through letters written by elderly preacher John Ames in the 1950s to his young son who, when he finally reaches an adulthood his father won’t see, will at least have this posthumous one-sided conversation: “While you read this, I am imperishable, somehow more alive than I have ever been.” This is a book about legacy, a record of a pocket of America that will never return, a reminder of the heartbreaking, ephemeral beauty that can be found in everyday life. As Ames concludes, to his son and himself: “There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient.” Read the review

by Hilary Mantel (2009)

Mantel had been publishing for a quarter century before the project that made her a phenomenon, set to be concluded with the third part of the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light , next March. To read her story of the rise of Thomas Cromwell at the Tudor court, detailing the making of a new England and the self-creation of a new kind of man, is to step into the stream of her irresistibly authoritative present tense and find oneself looking out from behind her hero’s eyes. The surface details are sensuously, vividly immediate, the language as fresh as new paint; but her exploration of power, fate and fortune is also deeply considered and constantly in dialogue with our own era, as we are shaped and created by the past. In this book we have, as she intended, “a sense of history listening and talking to itself”. Read the review

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Contemporary fiction and modernism.

• Ryan Trimm Ryan Trimm University of Rhode Island
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.186
• Published online: 28 March 2018

Modernism stands as the signal literary upheaval of the long 20th century, and yet the tenuousness of its appeal to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound commanded, entails the period or periods that follow are likewise uncertain save in their reference to modernism. However, even here there is ambivalence: contemporary authors might be charted regarding their modernist literary forebears, yet many explicitly reject modernist methods altogether; others continue this legacy, and still more look to complexly incorporate and negotiate modernist methods. Likewise, theoretical accounts of postwar fiction mark what comes after in reference to modernism: postmodernism, post-postmodernism, and the like. Modernism’s outsize shadow stems from its association with literary experimentation, aesthetic innovations elevating its austere emphasis on form above such traditional concerns as telling stories and creating characters. Though swaths of Anglophone fiction reject these modernist impulses and return to realist narratives, contemporary fiction must also be viewed as occurring within an era in which modernism has become institutionalized in university reading lists and the practices of their creative writing programs. Fiction after modernism thus might be best viewed as encompassing competing impulses, often within the same text or author: to revert to traditional modes of storytelling and thereby reject modernism; to borrow aspects of modernist technique but develop them so form might convey not only a sense of interior experience or textuality but also situate characters and texts socially (and globally); and to return afresh to those literary experiments, investing them with new relevance. These divided relations between contemporary fiction and aesthetic modernism underscore a complex and conflicted temporality operative within the very conceptions of both modernism and the contemporary.

• contemporary fiction
• postmodernism
• post-postmodernism
• 20th-century

Fredric Jameson warns “we cannot not periodize,” an obligation incurring a rhetoric of ruptures and continuities. 1 However, such exercises must be equivocal fictions, less an exact distinguishing of how one literary species begat another and more a useful fudge enabling discussion of how rough groupings of texts relate to each other in some sequence of development and divergence. These difficulties are all the more salient in discussing modernism and the period (or periods) that follow. In its assertion of novelty, modernism famously offers an antagonistic self-articulation, one marking division from all that preceded it. As Paul de Man notes, modernism functions to disrupt, making it consequently unstable and oppositional: “Modernity invests its trust in the power of the present moment as an origin, but discovers that, in severing itself from the past, it has at the same time severed itself from the present.” 2 Consequently, the modernizing impulse to make it new discloses “the impossibility of being modern.” 3 Newness, particularly that marshalled around a self-imposed imperative to innovate, entails an inability to connect to those prior sources of one’s own identity and a compulsion to move away from what constitutes one’s very present. If modernism is an impossible task, then its supersession positions the contemporary as what follows after such a fractious event, a modernity divided against itself (as this entry necessarily focuses on our own present, fraught questions of defining modernism as well as its relation to the contentious concept of modernity must be left to the side, even though these issues impact how contemporary fiction is perceived; further, modernism and contemporary fiction will both be largely discussed in terms of Western Anglophone fiction). In such circumstance, modernism’s new is fractured and no longer fresh; it thus stands as an uncertain progenitor or prior figure, a now-antiquated novelty. Moreover, if modernism as a label functions as less historically certain than previous periods defined around definite centuries, historical figures, or movements, then the contemporary situates its own newness with even more doubt, highlighting the hollow and deictic nature of the contemporary as a term. Indeed, the vagueness of the contemporary deprives it even of modernism’s oppositional stance, one supplied through manifestos, aesthetic pronouncements, and jarring stylistic difference. Consequently, the contemporary becomes an uncertain and belated moment, one ending we know not when. Given its open-ended nature on one side, the contemporary necessarily turns to modernism as the only frame that might allow its own identity to take some shape. The rationale for Jameson’s double-negative imperative becomes clear: as the uncertain period of modernism gives rise to one even more inchoate, articulating lines of relation becomes ever-more necessary for developing something approaching a grasp on moments that do indeed appear distinctive, permitting us to begin identifying major features; and yet these features pull in different directions, do not allow neat summative statements, sketch multiple lines of relation. In sum, periodizing the contemporary is a necessity, one for which the modern stands as the key figure; however, this task is also necessarily an impossible one or, rather, one whose work cannot be conclusively completed.

Both modernism and the contemporary depend on suggesting a faultline of newness. However, this sense of the new changes as modernism has given way to the contemporary. As Raymond Williams observed, the divergence of these terms is a relatively recent occurrence, one helping signal fraught relations between modernism and the contemporary: during the 20th century , “‘modern’ shifts its reference from ‘now’ to ‘just now’ or even ‘then,’ and for some time has been a designation always going into the past with which ‘contemporary’ may be contrasted for its presentness. ‘Modernism’ as a title for a whole cultural movement and moment has been retrospective as a term since the 1950s, thereby stranding the dominant version of ‘modern’ or even ‘absolute modern’ between, say, 1890 and 1940 .” 4 Peter Osborne develops this line of thinking, observing “the contemporary acted there mainly as a qualification of (rather than a counter to) ‘the modern’: the contemporary was the most recent modern, but a modern with a moderated, less ruptural futurity.” 5 As the modern became an historical period, the techniques associated with its imperative to “make it new” now marked literary historical categories, while the contemporary becomes an ill-defined period in its own right, one less well distinguished regarding standout techniques. Moreover, making the contemporary its own distinct period serves at once to separate it from previous moments while raising the problem of connection between these pasts and our present. Consequently, the contemporary comes to the fore only by situating modernism as something already accomplished, then defining itself as that which transpires after the modern. This recursiveness renders the contemporary something of a problem, a present in search of itself. Accordingly, the contemporary—or, better, the competing impulses within contemporary fiction—might be best defined through articulations of how this present now relates to modernism. This article accordingly sketches the major features of these lines of relation.

Genealogies

Modernist self-presentation, with its assertion of disruption and innovation, makes any subsequent gesture problematic: What comes after the absolutely new? The self-conscious belatedness of a contemporary after the modern lends itself either to what appears as recursive returns (showy turnings-back to some tradition defined around realism) or a reflexive problematizing of modernism’s formal focus (postmodernism). But these postwar waves might be seen to crest and recede, so what comes after what follows the new? Or might we after all still somehow be in the modernist wave, in the new? These formulations help foreground the manner in which such literary histories seem clear only that there was a prominent modernist tide, a movement that the contemporary still defines itself against, relations taking the form of some version of rejection, supersession, or continuation.

Here difficulties in pinning down modernism regarding both definition and historical limits are paralleled by an equal haziness around the contemporary: What constitutes the contemporariness of contemporary fiction? When did it begin? Even confining discussion to Anglophone fiction in Britain and the United States, uneasy parallels and jarring discrepancies appear. If the contemporary begins after 1945 , the American literary landscape encompasses the final phase of high modernists such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, as well as the blossoming of late modernists such as Vladimir Nabokov and James Baldwin. For the British scene, although the decades immediately following the war might contain late modernists (Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green), the main lines (as defined by literary historians such as Malcolm Bradbury) seem oriented more around a return to 19th-century realism: the Angry Young Men and following them a wave of Kitchen Sink writers. This discrepancy not only entails different relations to modernism (with the immediate postwar decades appearing either as a final flowering of modernism or an attempt to return to some prior style and technique), it also means the appearance of the first wave of postmodern authors in the 1960s and 1970s generates conflicting accounts: figures such as John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, and E. L. Doctorow seem to move away from the elitism of high modernism while authors such as B. S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, John Fowles, and Doris Lessing represent a reprise of the modernist foregrounding of fragmentary narratives stressing their own textuality. Moreover, the 1960s are now exceeding half a century away: its fiction can hardly be called contemporary. Then how does the relation between our new contemporary period and modernism compare with that of the postmoderns? Further, postcolonial writers such as Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie complicate these lines of relation. How does this ever-more-global scope of the contemporary transform our understanding of a purportedly cosmopolitan modernism? Attempts to answer such questions necessarily privilege some authors or national lineages rather than others; a more balanced assessment might be developed by providing a rough map of how competing contemporary trends strike varied relations with modernism.

One line of attack involves straightforward literary influences and genealogies. If early postmodernist authors such as Pynchon and Barth might be seen as reacting against modernism, subsequent authors appeared to consciously hark back to high modernism. Novelists who came to prominence during the 1970s and 1980s appear to align with modernist forebears: Toni Morrison with William Faulkner and Zora Neale Hurston; Jeanette Winterson with Virginia Woolf; Cormac McCarthy with Faulkner (as well as Ernest Hemingway); Peter Ackroyd with T. S. Eliot; Kazuo Ishiguro with Ford Madox Ford; V. S. Naipaul with Joseph Conrad; Percival Everett with Ralph Ellison; John Banville with Beckett and Henry James; Paul Auster with Franz Kafka (as well as Raymond Chandler); the familiar comparison of Salman Rushdie’s excess and J. M. Coetzee’s minimalism with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, respectively. Subsequent decades yield more such lines of descent: Alan Hollinghurst and Henry James; Michael Chabon and F. Scott Fitzgerald; Zadie Smith and E. M. Forster. A growing number of contemporary writers have also foregrounded a relationship to modernism through fiction explicitly invoking high (and early) modernist authors: Michael Cunningham’s The Hours traces Woolf’s composition of Mrs Dalloway , paralleling that narrative strand with characters who decades later echo Woolf’s Clarissa; Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words employs Hugh Selwyn Mauberly (the fictional “poet” of Ezra Pound’s eponymous poem) as its main character; Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy revolves around war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart War Hospital; Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde takes the form of a diary by the playwright; J. M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg follows Fyodor Dostoyevsky in an imagined scenario launching his writing The Devils ; Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot follows a retiree obsessed with the French author’s biography; Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt centers on a character who is the cook for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; Colm Tóibín ( The Master ), David Lodge ( Author, Author ), Cynthia Ozick (“Quartet”), and Alan Hollinghurst ( The Line of Beauty ) all invoke Henry James. In addition, contemporary authors have engaged with modernism in other forms such as music (Toni Morrison’s Jazz , Michael Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter , Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time , Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo ) and the visual arts (Don Delillo’s Underworld ; Richard Powers’s Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance ; William Boyd’s Any Human Heart ). Modernism constitutes a rich source of influence as well as a growing field for fictional topics and themes.

However, this warm embrace of the modernist legacy does not comprise the entirety of contemporary fiction, for many authors consciously position themselves against the stylistic and narrative innovations that had, per its self-characterization, constituted the soul of modernism. Spurning a reflexive textuality, whether of the modern or postmodern variety, these authors hark back to a realist tradition, a self-conscious aversion to and rejection of modernism. Philip Roth, for example, has pronounced high modernist experimentation as “outlandish.” 6 Dale Peck has more violently repudiated modernism, summarizing its genealogy as a progression from Ulysses ’ “diarrhoeic flow of words” to Faulkner’s “incomprehensible ramblings and the sterile inventions of Nabokov.” 7 Indeed, for realist authors such as Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Jonathan Franzen, their fiction relates to modernism primarily by attempting to move as far as possible from its techniques. This vein of contemporary fiction thus treats modernism as a mistake or an experiment gone too far, an era that should be treated as a regrettable lapse.

Retrospective Relations: Modernism and Postmodernism

In all these accounts, modernism appears as the exceptional literary event, the major tectonic literary upheaval of the past century plus, its formal innovations transforming genres and narrative techniques for good or ill. Consequently, the very identity of the literary waves breaking after 1945 (and modernism’s apparent completion) take shape against this self-perception, whether as reversal, return, or complex negotiation. Indeed, the contemporary is often defined against a canonization of modernism: many critics argue that contemporary literature in its various guises, waves, and impulses is articulated around the institutionalization of modernism within university curricula. 8 Moreover, modernism’s academic enshrinement has coincided with an increasing theorization of literary and cultural studies, so modernism and its relation to contemporary literature has been a major concern for theoretical engagements. In addition, authors (and theories) rarely fall neatly into one camp or another, for a varied diet of influences and a complex menu of techniques entail that in a single author, Zadie Smith, say, the influence of both modernism and 19th-century realism might be witnessed. Smith’s fiction largely returns to realism and as such appears to move away from the experimentation associated with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; however, at the same time, Smith’s fiction also includes open homages to modernist figures (E. M. Forster in On Beauty ), the use of modernist devices (stream of consciousness in NW ; a disordered temporality in White Teeth ), and postmodernist riffs (most especially in White Teeth and The Autograph Man ) indicating a complex relation to modernism. Taking Smith as an exemplary figure for most (if not all) contemporary novelists, a neat map depicting which authors reject modernism, which continue with or return to modernist devices and themes, and which negotiate a complex relation to the modernist legacy is impossible. Rather, these different lines of relation might be discussed better around critics and theorists who trace specific connections between modernism and contemporary fiction. These shifting patterns of relation for contemporary fiction appear less as neat genealogies or rejections and more as unstable weather systems, ephemeral fronts where competing pockets of pressure produce changing lines of relation.

Here, postmodernism stands as the movement where relations between modernism and the contemporary are made most explicit. The growing rift between modernism and the contemporary after mid-century led to “postmodernism” being coined as a periodizing stopgap, a signal that some movement had occurred away from modernism but without a clear account of what this next act might be save in relation to the modern. Now that postmodernism itself seems increasingly consigned to literary history, the postmodern stands in uneasy relation with the contemporary. As most accounts of contemporary fiction date this phenomenon from after World War II or after 1960 , postmodernism comprises an (or perhaps the) opening movement of the contemporary. However, even as something fully completed, postmodernism also stands as the historical bridge between our own moment and the era of heroic modernism. Indeed, accounts of postmodernism provide the clearest articulations of how modernism relates to contemporary fiction.

As many have observed, the advent of postmodernism during the 1960s foregrounded relations with modernism: Douglas Kellner notes, “utilizing the term ‘postmodern’ in a meaningful way requires that one develop a systematic contrast with the ‘modern’.” 9 Accordingly, major postmodern theorists in the 1970s and 1980s stressed lines of relation between modernism and postmodernism. Ihab Hassan charts counterpointed lists of traits associated with each period, modernism’s drive for qualities such as form, design, and a sense of purpose contrasting with postmodernism’s “antiform,” an emphasis on the aleatory, and a general spirit of playfulness. 10 This schematic highlighted some shared sense of technique between the two periods but also foregrounded a sense of openness and inconclusiveness witnessed in early postmodern fictions such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman . For Andreas Huyssen, the contrast between these ends of the century revolves around different relations to mass culture. Modernism had distinguished itself from rising mass cultural forms such as cinema, radio, and the tabloid press, a divorce from the marketplace granting austere purpose to modernist literary experimentation, an asceticism that emphasized its aestheticism. Labeling this separation the “Great Divide,” Huyssen argues “postmodernism rejects [its] theories and practices. . . . Indeed, the birth of the postmodern out of the spirit of an adversary avant-gardism cannot be adequately understood unless modernism’s and postmodernism’s different relationship to mass culture is grasped.” 11 Huyssen’s argument appears to best address particular lines of post-1960s American fiction where mass culture genres or commercial products are foregrounded, encompassing authors such as Pynchon, Don Delillo, Bret Eaton Ellis, and Mark Leyner, and distinguishing them from seemingly more high-minded high modernists. Similarly, Wendy Steiner agrees the first wave of postmodernists reacted against the “difficulty” of modernism, its elite experimentation. Steiner suggests these 1960s and 1970s authors wished to retain the notion that formal distinctiveness would retain a properly pure aesthetic focus. However, here, the emphasis on form was a blind alley, leading to a calcified self-conscious style and lamentations regarding the novel’s extinction. 12 Modernism is then seen as having inaugurated an unsustainable emphasis on a purity of aesthetic form that produced an exhaustion of possible narrative techniques and stylistic modes in following the “ ‘high road’ of art.” 13 In this account, writers disparaged because of gender (Joyce Carol Oates) or race (Alice Walker), a relegation due to practicing purportedly outdated modes of realism, help resolve this impasse by rejuvenating old forms. 14

Other theories stress the way apparently similar narrative devices and styles between the two periods actually foregrounded different orientations toward self and world. Brian McHale suggests that, though the periods shared numerous devices and themes such as fragmentation and a self-conscious formalism, the difference was a shift from an internal to an external inclination: “the modernist novel explored interior experience ” through representing “embodied consciousness—the mind in its engagement with the world—which underlies and motivates many of modernism’s experiments in narration, perspective, the representation of interiority, temporality, and language, as well as its problematizing of knowing and unknowing. Modernist fiction was epistemological , knowledge-oriented.” 15 Modernism is conceived here primarily around stream-of-consciousness fictions such as those by Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce, fiction defined primarily through its depiction of subjectivity evoked through the play of perception and memory. In contrast, McHale suggests postmodernism “was ontological in its orientation . . . ask[ing] ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’ . . . postmodernist fiction did not take the world for granted as a backdrop against which the adventures of consciousness could be played out but rather foregrounded the world itself as an object of reflection and contestation. Postmodernism multiplied and juxtaposed worlds; it troubled and volatized them.” 16 Authors such as Barth, Pynchon, and Fowles whose fiction foregrounds multiple possible realities are envisioned as generating the central impetus of contemporary fiction. The differences between modernism and postmodernism appear as divided orientations, modernism’s “centripetal” drive for “strategies of inwardness” versus postmodernism’s “centrifugal” inclination with its “‘openness’ to the world outside and beyond consciousness.” 17 This assessment might be extended as modernist texts often have the sense of a center (or perhaps pine for a center) toward which the allusions, fragments, and disparate narrative foci gravitate: a “mythic method,” a master intertext, a shared moment/place/event, a longing for a reassembled culture. In contrast, postmodern texts fragment into uncertain constellations, at best unsure anything might firmly forge the pieces back together again into a fully signifying whole or system. Postmodern constellations appear unstable and doubtful of any plenitudinous meaning: these fictions conjure conspiracies that might not actually exist, histories and stories that ultimately pull in different directions, glimpses of a sublime that seem half farcical.

Precisely this sense of a rupture in representation led Jean-François Lyotard to offer one of the most influential theoretical accounts of the relation between modernism and a contemporary defined around postmodernism, a difference less about period tendencies and more regarding how such techniques expressed contrasting attitudes toward modernity. Lyotard suggests the distinction between modernism and postmodernism transpires through the “disappearance of the close bond” between aesthetic endeavors and “an ideal of the progressive realization of social and individual emancipation encompassing all humanity,” an evaporation ending any possibility of centripetal movement. 18 Consequently, postmodernism “finds itself condemned to undertake a series of minor modifications in a space inherited from modernity . . . there is no longer any horizon of universality, universalization, or general emancipation.” 19 The contemporary in its guise as the postmodern accordingly resorts to “‘bricolage’: the multiple quotation of elements taken from earlier styles or periods . . . this ‘rupture’ is in fact a way of forgetting or repressing the past, that is, repeating it and not surpassing it.” 20 Postmodernism is a reassessment of the past, not in the form of adherence to some tradition, but more from a state of blockage or inability to construct the entirely new; beyond exhaustion or replenishment then, the pastiches of Barth and Ackroyd appear as a recalibration. Modernism, in contrast, is precisely the attempt to jettison techniques from the past in a sublime attempt to articulate the wholly new, as in the way Joyce and John dos Passos developed innovative styles and narrative strategies. For Lyotard, the postmodern sense of belated exhaustion in fact precedes endeavors to embark on wholly new paths: “A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.” 21 That is, a self-conscious awareness of form and presence within a history is necessarily a reflexive step intervening before the development of new forms striving to refine the powers of representation for fresh assaults on the unrepresentable.

Fredric Jameson builds on this argument in his own account of modernism and postmodernism, a theorization persistent still as the reference point regarding relations between modernism and postwar cultural forms. Modernism and postmodernism, for Jameson, correlate with the oncoming tide of modernity and capitalism. The essential difference between the two eras is that modernism still retains a sense of something outside capitalism, an exterior lost during the postmodern regime: “In modernism . . . some residual sense of ‘nature’ or ‘being,’ of the old, the older, the archaic, still subsist; culture can still do something to that nature and work at transforming that ‘referent.’ Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.” 22 For him, modernism emphasized temporality through such means as reworking narrative form and its focus on conveying consciousness. Contemporary fiction during the postmodern regime accordingly demonstrates a contrasting stress on space. 23 Though Jameson somewhat agrees the postmodern era in fiction has ended, he still views contemporary fiction as unable to provide a proper historicizing assessment of its own moment, an echo of his account of postmodernism. Current fiction operates with an emphasis on “suddenness,” a “singularity [that] is a pure present without a past or present.” 24 Texts like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder invoke modernism’s formal experimentation but do so through “one-off” narrative and stylistic techniques, “one-time unrepeatable formal events” that in inventing a mode that will not be replicated formally stress the text as pure irruption. This instantaneity through non-replicable forms, for Jameson, carries postmodern schizophrenia into the age of the financial derivative, investment vehicles and products themselves based on mysterious and arcane logarithms which are not extendable to or exemplary for any other situation or financial scheme. 25 Such assessment finds in contemporary fiction an echo of modernism’s focus on the new but, against such now-canonical techniques, offers instead a novelty whose newness is always purely now for it could have neither progeny or a developmental arc as it resides solely in a present moment. Some critics, however, have warned that here theories of postmodernism collapse with their object of critique. Timothy Bewes, in particular, has warned that theorists such as Jameson (as well as Hassan) produce a depthless, consumer-driven spectacle world purged of traditional narratives, emotions, and full-fledged identities, a realm where “events are no longer possible,” a closure of history echoing the smug assessments of conservative figures such as Francis Fukuyama. 26 The presentism of such accounts entails they are unable to articulate meaningful relations with specific legacies of the past such as the modernist project.

Post-Postmodernism and After

As postmodernism is seen as having arisen in the 1960s and then reached a high summer of accomplishment in fiction and theorization during the 1980s, it is small wonder the movement is increasingly viewed as having expired some time during the decade or so that followed. Consequently, many critics suggest the postmodern moment has itself given way to something else, a supersession entailing transformation of relations between the contemporary and the postmodern. The apparent faltering of postmodernism, though, means that whatever period follows (and “contemporary” has been the most prominent literary label) must be assessed as well regarding its relation to modernism. Some view a movement away from the postmodern as entailing a similar shift away from modernism’s concern with difficult styles and techniques, a concern with form seen as foregrounding the separateness of these literary texts. Madhu Dubey suggests that “if postmodernism ended some time around 1990 , American fiction in the following decades . . . is said to be marked by a renewed engagement with the social world . . . [constituting] a new kind of fiction that once again aspires to represent and critique the social world.” 27 The emergence of these new realisms—dirty realism, neo-realism, new realism, and the like—signify the modernist project is now truly over, that fiction has returned to traditional modes. Dubey characterizes the 1980s moment of high postmodernism as mirroring the previous era of modernism, as both had occurred during eras when the “lineaments of a political-economic system” were undergoing transformation; when a new dominant later installed itself (for the contemporary, a “flexible regime of accumulation” constituted on a now truly global scale), this newfound stability makes it easier for plots and subjects to be charted in a social world. 28 That is, formalist experimentation, whether modernist or postmodernist, only rises to prominence during times of socio-economic transition. Josh Toth and Neil Brooks concur, suggesting the dominant feature of the return to realism is that this neorealism has eschewed postmodern metafiction, a move away from formalism that “seems to be indicative of a more general epistemological relinquishment of aesthetic imperatives as such .” 29 Here the contemporary in moving away from postmodernism also firmly leaves behind the modernist legacy, shifting from a self-conscious formalism to relatively straightforward representations of the contemporary world.

In contrast, Mark McGurl emphasizes less stylistic dominants/experiments distinguishing individual literary periods and more institutional transformations bridging them together. Postwar fiction, particularly in the American scene, increasingly revolved around university campuses as the locus where novels where written, read, and rendered canonical through institutionalization in course syllabi. As such, the growth in creative writing programs—and the style of fiction they practiced, taught, and championed—should be seen as mirroring the explosive rise of the “modern cold war laboratory.” This new fiction might be usefully seen as “technomodernist,” a term stressing “continuity of much postwar American fiction with the modernist project of a systematic experimentation with narrative form, even as it registers a growing acknowledgement of the ‘scandalous’ continuity of the literary techne (craft) with technology in the grosser sense—including . . . mass media technology . . . modernist narrative becomes visible not as the antithesis of debased genre fiction but as a genre in its own right called literary fiction—which relativization does not . . . disable the distinction between high and low . . . but situates it in a larger cultural industrial system.” 30 That is, modernist fiction develops itself as a highly evolved discipline much like nuclear physics or biochemistry, generating a field of knowledge (and an outpouring of sophisticated products) that increasingly appear arcane to outsiders. Postwar authors are apprenticed into this genre of literary fiction. Consequently, self-conscious modern and postmodern prose might be thus seen not as “radically ‘deconstructive’ ” but rather as “radically conventional, as testaments to the continuing interests of literary forms as objects of a certain kind of professional research.” 31 McGurl suggests this research foregrounds literariness, “as moments in the operation, the autopoiesis, of a larger system geared for the production of self-expressive originality,” a self-conscious concern with craft institutionalized through the spread of creative writing programs. 32 Contemporary fiction is then only an official instantiation of modernism, house-training literary experiments into house style for creative writing programs. Fiction written by those associated with such programs distinguishes itself from popular fiction and extends these techniques across a range of minority cultures, “synthesizing the particularity of the ethnic—or analogously marked—voice with the elevated idiom of literary modernism.” 33 These developments help “partially democratize” modernism, moving it from an elite literary practice to a practice extended to all who undergo academic training in this trade.

Similarly, Amy Hungerford suggests that since postmodernism was characterized by a certain institutionalization of modernism, the arc of an extended 20th-century literary history might best be labeled as “long modernism.” 34 The closure of this era then appears less antagonistic and more uncertain—Hungerford suggests “the period formerly known as contemporary” and then “post 45,” the latter designating a bare chronology that nonetheless swallows up both the immediate post-war reactions against modernism and the following postmodern era. 35 Along these lines, Jeremy Green likewise notes the apparent closure of postmodernism occasions reassessment of the relation between the apparently austere formalism of modernism, and a more generous and demotic postmodern, for the relation between high modernism and the contemporary “now looks a good deal more variegated and complex; an awareness of modernism’s internationalism has begun to offer a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of the literary periods.” 36 Likewise, Matthew Hart and Amy Elias suggest the apparent closure of the postmodern moment occasions a larger re-assessing of how the contemporary relates to modernism, foregrounding not only ruptures with modernism but also how contemporary fiction maintains a number of continuities. 37

Consequently, as David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris indicate, marking the end of postmodernism is an uncertain process, for “its legacy still has a persistent influence” and claims that it is definitively over “carry with them the implications that first, it is clear what ‘postmodernism’ means; second, its meaning is stable and unitary; and third, the proposed finishing moment . . . neatly encapsulates both the essence of the postmodern and the clear evidence of its downfall.” 38 Here they echo Jameson, for though postmodernism might be superseded as a period term, the techniques associated with it might still be observed flourishing in the wilds of literary fiction. 39 Authors such as Colson Whitehead ( John Henry Davs ), Margaret Atwood ( Oryx and Crake ), David Mitchell ( Cloud Atlas ), Hari Kunzru ( Gods Without Men ), and Nicola Barker ( Darklands ) all have produced fiction returning to—or perhaps continuing—postmodern techniques. However, if postmodernism still persists within the contemporary as a stylistic mode, then increasingly modernism itself is also making a reappearance.

Beyond the direct invocation of modernist figures in fiction by Barnes, Cunningham, Hollinghurst, Toibin, and the like, a growing number of contemporary authors have adapted modernist modes. Tom McCarthy in fact has proclaimed that “the task for contemporary literature is to deal with the legacy of modernism.” 40 Many authors have followed through on this sentiment: McCarthy’s own C is not only set during the years of high modernism but also returns to its interior focus; Ian McEwan’s Atonement toys with both stream of consciousness and the late modernist styles of figures like Elizabeth Bowen; Will Self’s trilogy ( Umbrella , Shark , and Phone ) employs wandering streams of consciousness that not only move between characters present within a given contemporary frame but also subsume thoughts of other characters encountered decades before; Monique Truong has employed stream-of-consciousness narration in both of her novels to date ( Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth ). David James and Urmila Seshagiri label such recent fictional efforts as metamodernism, a movement regarding “modernism as an era, an aesthetic, and an archive”—in sum, a resource for creating contemporary works. 41 The fictions thus addressed to high modernism comprise “narratives of modernism,” a phrase referring “on one hand, to experimental fiction shaped by an aesthetics of discontinuity, nonlinearity, interiority, and chronological play,” while on the other, it “describes fictions—overtly experimental or otherwise—plotted around the very creation of modern art and letters.” 42 Such fictions reappropriate modernist techniques as well as addressing modernism’s “sociopolitical, historical, and philosophical contexts.” 43 It seems striking that a rough assessment of metamodernism finds the practice more prevalent in British authors than American ones, a tendency that might speak to the power of American creative writing programs to move would-be authors away from techniques such as stream-of-consciousness narration. Such an observation thus reveals limits to the suggestion that such programs domesticate modernist experimentation—or perhaps the limiting effects of this domestication.

Elsewhere, David James characterizes this return to modernist aesthetics as contemporary fiction’s negotiation of the legacy of modernism: “fiction today partakes of an interaction between innovation and inheritance that is entirely consonant with what modernists themselves were doing more than a century ago, an interaction that enables writers to work with their lineage in the process of attempting new experiments with form.” 44 This assessment continues to foreground the conception of modernism as an acme of innovation regarding narrative form and style. And representing consciousness too returns as a central objective of this reworked aesthetic but in a manner reflective of the world structuring these perceptions: “contemporary writers reveal the potential for modernist fiction to be more than simply a laboratory for examining consciousness as a hermetic domain . . . [by] incorporat[ing] techniques for showing how mental experiences are shaped by material circumstances.” 45 Fiction over the long 20th century abandons the lurch between centripetal interiority and centrifugal exteriority, now looking to interweave epistemological and ontological interrogations. Such re-engagements, according to James, refashion not only our understanding of modernism but also what constitutes the contemporary: “The contemporary itself . . . is no longer what it was.” 46 However, this uncertain contemporaneity is matched by a transformed vision of modernism. James maintains “a more complex account of fiction’s transitions from mid-century to the present can only be achieved by an understanding of what modernism was but also of what it might still become.” 47 This reassessing impulse is also behind the endeavor represented by the “New Modernist Studies,” an “expansion” reconsidering the temporal, spatial, and vertical (regarding divisions between high art and popular culture, changing canons, problems of reception, and inclusion/reevaluation of works by authors of “marginalized social groups”) boundaries of how modernism has been traditionally understood. 48 Indeed, for some time, the contemporary has been viewed as something revising our understanding of modernism itself: not only does the modern stand as some prior moment to which the contemporary must reply, but contemporary fiction might transform how modernism is understood. 49

Of course, the reason for these widely differing positions on the legacy of modernism in contemporary fiction, one ranging from something largely superseded to a return to modernist methods, is that the contemporary is an impossibly broad category and even individual novels house competing impulses. A novel like Ian McEwan’s Atonement , for example, amply illustrates this division: it employs a mostly realist opening section but does so as part of a deeper metafictional device in which a variety of narrative modes are employed that evoke specific moments and literary strategies from the long 20th century . Atonement thus seems to hark back to an older realism, one that would eschew modernism; yet at the same time that realism is self-consciously subsumed into techniques gleaned from modernism’s legacy—a metafictional deployment of a panoply of narrative and stylistic techniques. The novel illustrates Peter Boxall’s argument that contemporary fiction is defined precisely around the question of relation to previous literary movements. Boxall suggests the developmental arc of the novel after the high moderns be viewed around the “negotiation of the political and ethical relationship that prose fiction has with the historical past. It is possible to trace the passage from the modernist fiction of Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Stein and Faulkner, through the forms of realism that emerged partly as a reaction against modernism . . . to the postmodern fiction of Rushdie, Barth, Marquez and Carter, in terms of the novel’s engagement with the past, and the forms with which it seeks to record and manipulate it.” 50 Contemporary fiction, given the rise of creative writing programs and Anglophone literature as an academic field of study, cannot but see itself as an epigone: every stylistic and narrative choice necessarily invokes forebears. As such, modernism stands most prominently as the largest debt, at once providing a rich archive to navigate and also clearly underscoring the reflexive sense of textuality linking modernism with much contemporary fiction. Whether through explicit or implicit rejection, self-conscious reclamation, or complex and ambivalent negotiation, modernism is the most significant prior period to which contemporary fiction relates itself.

Consequently, this relation between modernism and the contemporary reveals the uncertain and gravid potential of our own present. Peter Osborne suggests this contemporary moment might be best seen as a “con-temporaneity, a coming together not simply ‘in’ time, but of times: we do not just live or exist together ‘in time’ with our contemporaries—as if time is indifferent to this existing together—but rather the present is increasingly characterized by a coming together of different but equally ‘present’ temporalities or ‘times’, a temporal unity of disjunction, or a disjunctive unity of present times .” 51 Accordingly, modernism would thus be the most prominent moment in our divided and ecstatic present, the most jarring such moment unsettling the present. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben highlights a Nietzschean “untimeliness” at work in the contemporary. 52 This sense of being out of season means the contemporary is never fully present to itself as such, for it is always at odds with one’s own time: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism .” 53 If such a present is disrupted by the unrealized nature of particular pasts that linger significantly, by the specter of futures that might visit again through shades who never truly departed, then modernism remains the most persistent of these disjunctive literary ghosts.

Discussion of the Literature

Questions of modernity, postmodernity, and the contemporary have provoked major theoretical endeavors as in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Paul de Man, Jean-François Lyotard, Peter Osborne, and Raymond Williams. Critically, endeavors to define the postmodern necessitated distinguishing it from the modern. 54 Central to these distinctions has been the argument that fiction from the 1960s represents a reaction to the institutionalization of modernism within reading lists, syllabi, and creative writing programs; Mark McGurl provides the most sustained and supported version of this argument. 55 All such arguments might be too briefly summarized as suggesting that postmodernism and the contemporary incorporates some elements of the modernist method but distinguishes itself by key differences in technique and outlook, with the contemporary being more demotic regarding mass culture, offering a stronger sense of being open-ended (an emphasis on centrifugal forces for it is no longer able to fully conceive a socio-economic totality or any outside to capitalism), etc. Such accounts are opposed to those critics and novelists arguing that modernism (and postmodernism) constitute a blind alley of formalism, a wrong turn from which fiction must return to traditional byways of realism and straightforward narration. 56 Overall, the key reference point for periodizing relations between modernism and postmodernism/the contemporary within the literary historical narrative of the long 20th century has been the long arc of Fredric Jameson’s arguments from the 1980s on.

Since the turn of the millennium, there have been several collections and journal special issues garnering appraisals and post-mortems on the postmodern; the essays gathered there generate useful maps of the apparent passing of postmodernity. The collections include Postmodern/Postwar and After edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden; Postmodernism. What Moment? edited by Pelagia Goulimari; Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century edited by David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris; and the special issue of Twentieth-Century Literature edited by Jason Gladstone and Daniel Worden. Amy Hungerford also has been a central figure as well in endeavoring to formulate how the contemporary might be in the process of diverging from the postmodern.

Likewise, shifts in considerations of postmodernism have led to alterations in how the lines of relation between modernism and contemporary fiction are viewed. David James has helped launch this reappraisal; his Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel , as well as his edited collection The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction offer essential forays for considering both the mainlines of relation between modernism and the contemporary as well as interrogations of individual lineages between modernist authors and contemporary novelists. These critical endeavors have also returned focus to more broadly theoretical assessments of both modernism and the contemporary, arguments ranging from classic assessments by Paul de Man and Raymond Williams to more recent arguments by Peter Osborne and Giorgio Agamben.

Further Reading

• Connor, Steven . “Modernism After Postmodernism.” In The Cambridge History of Modernism . Edited by Vincent Sherry , 820–834. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
• Green, Jeremy . Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
• Hoberek, Andrew , with Samuel Cohen , Amy J. Elias , Mary Esteve , Matthew Hart , and David James . “Postmodern, Postwar, Contemporary: A Dialogue on the Field.” In Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature . Edited by Jason Gladstone , Andrew Hoberek , and Daniel Worden , 27–56. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016.
• Hungerford, Amy . “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary.” American Literary History 20, no. 1–2 (2008): 410–419.
• Huyssen, Andreas . After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism . Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986.
• James, David . “Introduction: Mapping Modernist Continuities.” In The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction . Edited by David James , 1–19. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• James, David . Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
• James, David , and Urmila Seshagiri . “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution.” PMLA 129, no. 1 (2014): 87–100.
• Jameson, Fredric . “Modernism and Imperialism.” In Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature . Edited by Seamus Deane , 43–66. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Though the argument of this book does not extend to the postwar period, Jameson’s situation of modernism in relation to its own moment provides essential background for his broader narrative of the relation between modernism and postmodernism developed in other texts.
• Jameson, Fredric . Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
• Jameson, Fredric . A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present . New York: Verso, 2002.
• Lyotard, Jean-François . The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge . Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
• Lyotard, Jean-François . The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985 . Translated by Don Barry , Bernadette Maher , Julian Pefanis , Virginia Spate , and Morgan Thomas . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
• McGurl, Mark . The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
• McHale, Brian . Constructing Postmodernism . New York: Routledge, 1992.
• McHale, Brian . The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Steiner, Wendy . “Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature: Vol. 7 , Prose Writing, 1940–1990 . Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch , 425–538. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

1. Fredric Jameson , A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 29.

2. Paul de Man , Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 149.

3. de Man, 144.

4. Raymond Williams , The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists . Ed. Tony Pinkney (New York: Verso, 1989), 32.

5. Peter Osborne , Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (New York: Verso, 2013), 16.

6. Philip Roth, in Milbauer, Asher Z. and Donald G. Watson , “An Interview with Philip Roth.” In Reading Philip Roth . Ed. Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 1–12.

7. Dale Peck , “The Moody Blues,” The New Republic 227, no. 1 (2002): 37.

8. See Andreas Huyssen , After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986); Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Wendy Steiner , “Postmodern Fictions, 1970–1990,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature: Vol. 7, Prose Writing, 1940–1990 , ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 425–538; Mark McGurl , “The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (2005): 102–129; and David James , Modernist Future: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

9. Douglas Kellner , “Reappraising the Postmodern: Novelties, Mapping and Historical Narratives,” in Postmodernism. What Moment? , ed. Pelagia Goulimari (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007), 108; see also Peter Osborne , The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant- Garde (New York: Verso, 1995), viii; and Bill Brown , “The Dark Wood of Postmodernity (Space, Faith, Allegory),” PMLA 120, no. 3 (2005): 735.

10. Ihab Hassan , The Dismemberment of Orpheus (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 267–268.

11. Huyssen, After the Great Divide , viii.

12. Steiner, “Postmodern Fictions,” 429.

13. Steiner, 427.

14. Steiner, 431–432.

15. Brian McHale, The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (New York: Cambridge University Press), 14.

16. McHale, 15.

17. Brian McHale , Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1992), 44.

18. Jean-François Lyotard , The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982–1985 , trans. Don Barry , Bernadette Maher , Julian Pefanis , Virginia Spate , and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 76.

19. Lyotard, 76.

20. Lyotard, 76.

21. Jean-François Lyotard , The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge , trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 79.

22. Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), ix.

23. Fredric Jameson , “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92 (2015): 105.

24. Jameson, 113.

25. Jameson, 117.

26. Timothy Bewes , “Against the Ontology of the Present: Paul Auster’s Cinematographic Fictions,” Twentieth Century Literature 53, no. 3 (2007): 275.

27. Madhu Dubey , “Post-Postmodern Realism?” Twentieth Century Literature 57, no. 3/4 (2011): 364.

28. Dubey, 368.

29. Toth, Josh . “ from The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (2010). In Supplanting the Postmodern . (Eds.) David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 219–249, p. 219. See also Josh Toth and Neil Brooks , “Renewalism: Introduction: A Wake and Renewed? (2007)”. In Supplanting the Postmodern . Ed. David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 209–218; and Toth, Josh . “ from The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary (2010). In Supplanting the Postmodern . Ed. David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 209–218.

30. McGurl “The Program Era,” 109.

31. McGurl, 111.

32. McGurl, 112.

33. McGurl, 117–118.

34. Amy Hungerford , “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–2 (2008): 418.

35. Hungerford, 410–419.

36. Jeremy Green , Late Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 22.

37. Matthew Hart and Amy Elias, in Hoberek, Andrew with Samuel Cohen, Amy J. Elias, Mary Estreve, Matthew Hart, and David James. “Postmodern, Postwar, Contemporary: A Dialogue on the Field.” In Postmodern/Postwar and After: Rethinking American Literature (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press), 27–56. See pp. 30–34.

38. David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris, “Introduction,” in Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century , eds. David Rudrum and Nicholas Stavris.

39. See Fredric Jameson , “Postscript,” in Postmodernism. What Moment? , ed. Pelagia Goulimari (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2007): 213, 215; Rey Chow , “On the Graphic in Postmodern Theoretical Writing,” Twentieth Century Literature 57, nos. 3/4 (2011): 373–374; and Hillary Chute , “The Popularity of Postmodernism,” Twentieth Century Literature 57, nos. 3/4 (2011): 354.

40. Tom McCarthy, personal conversation with James Purdon.

41. David James and Urmila Seshagiri , “Metamodernism: Narratives of Continuity and Revolution,” PMLA 129, no. 1 (2014): 88.

42. James and Seshagiri, 89.

43. James and Seshagiri, 93.

44. David James , Modernist Futures: Innovation and Inheritance in the Contemporary Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 2.

45. James, Futures , 10.

46. James, Futures , 11.

47. David James , “Introduction: Mapping Modernist Continuities,” in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction , ed. David James (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.

48. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz , “The New Modernist Studies,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (2008): 737–738.

49. See Patricia Waugh , Practicing Postmodernism, Reading Modernism (New York: Edwin Arnold, 1992).

50. Peter Boxall . Twenty-First-Century Fiction: A Critical Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 46.

51. Peter Osborne , Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (New York: Verso, 2013), 17.

52. Giorgio Agamben , Nudities , trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 10.

53. Agamben, 11.

54. See Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus ; Huyssen, After the Great Divide ; McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Routledge); and Steiner, “Postmodern Fictions.

55. McGurl, “The Program Era.”

56. See Dubey, “Post-Postmodern Realism?” for one version.

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More than four decades after its founding, the Journal of Modern Literature remains a leading scholarly journal in the field of modern and contemporary literature and is widely recognized as such. It emphasizes scholarly studies of literature in all languages, as well as related arts and cultural artifacts, from 1900 to the present. International in its scope, its contributors include scholars from Australia, Canada, China, England, Denmark, France, Israel, Japan, Nigeria, Spain, and Turkey.

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Title: quantifying social presence in mixed reality: a contemporary review of techniques and innovations.

Abstract: This literature review investigates the transformative potential of mixed reality (MR) technology, where we explore the intersection of contemporary technological advancements, modern deep learning recommendation systems, and social psychology frameworks. This interdisciplinary study informs the understanding of MR's role in improving social presence, catalyzing novel social interactions, and enhancing the quality of interpersonal communication in the real world. We also discuss the challenges and barriers blocking the wide-spread adoption of social networking in MR, such as device constraints, privacy and accessibility concerns, and social norms. Through carefully structured, closed-environment experiments with diverse participants of varying levels of digital literacy, we measure the differences in social dynamics, frequency, quality, and duration of interactions, and levels of social anxiety between MR-enhanced, mobile-enhanced, and control condition participants.

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Contemporary Literature

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Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. Contemporary Literature published the first articles on Thomas Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo; it also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J. M. Coetzee to American readers. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, Contemporary Literature features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates.

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• An Interview with Nicole Krauss
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• pp. 283-302

• Refusing the Will to Health: Neoliberal Wellness Culture and Asian American Literature
• Sharon N. Tran
• pp. 303-334
• Theater of the Precariat: Staging Precarity in Alexander Zeldin's Love
• Peter Simonsen, Mathies G. Aarhus
• pp. 335-361
• Feralizing the Human/Animal Distinction in Bhanu Kapil's Humanimal
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• pp. 362-387
• Reading Affect in Harryette Mullen's S*PeRM**K*T
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• Toward Black Animality Studies
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• Contemporary Poetry and Comparative Iterature
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Book Review: Emily Henry is still the modern-day rom-com queen with ‘Funny Story’

This cover image released by Berkley shows “Funny Story” by Emily Henry. (Berkley via AP)

• Copy Link copied

“Funny Story” isn’t a funny story at all. But it is a good one.

Emily Henry’s new romance novel starts with dueling breakups that have rocked the two main characters’ worlds — and forced them to bond over their shared broken hearts.

Daphne is a planner who is always on time. She’s a buttoned-up librarian who hosts a lively children’s reading hour and keeps her personal life closed off from her colleagues.

Miles is more subdued. He’s nice, thoughtful and able to win over anyone he’s talking to, especially the regulars he sees on his weekend trips to the farmers market. He doesn’t have much of a relationship with his parents, for myriad reasons, but he’s very close to his younger sister.

Daphne and Miles’ story starts as they navigate their newly single lives now that their exes are dating ... each other.

They go through the throes of grieving together, with a soundtrack of love songs accompanying each phase. It’s practically begging for a movie version, to go along with the several other Henry books already in various stages of production.

Early on, they decide to pretend they’re dating to make their exes jealous. But as time goes on, they discover that they see each other as more than friends, that they really are falling for each other.

“Funny Story” is Henry’s latest romance — and her steamiest one so far. It’s a mixture of will-they-won’t-they in a way that makes you really want them to. They’re the protagonists in separate love stories who are brought together by heartbreak. Daphne and Miles are characters you can empathize with and root for.

And “Funny Story” is classic Henry. It’s a meet-cute in a non-patronizing way. It’s a modern love story, and one that you won’t be mad is slightly predictable — because it makes you feel good and makes you believe in a thing called love.

“So many of the most beautiful things in life are unexpected,” Henry writes.

It’s funny how life and love are both that way.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

Book Review: Emily Henry is still the modern-day rom-com queen with 'Funny Story'

“Funny Story” isn’t a funny story at all, but it is a good one

“Funny Story” isn’t a funny story at all. But it is a good one.

Emily Henry's new romance novel starts with dueling breakups that have rocked the two main characters’ worlds — and forced them to bond over their shared broken hearts.

Daphne is a planner who is always on time. She’s a buttoned-up librarian who hosts a lively children’s reading hour and keeps her personal life closed off from her colleagues.

Miles is more subdued. He’s nice, thoughtful and able to win over anyone he’s talking to, especially the regulars he sees on his weekend trips to the farmers market. He doesn’t have much of a relationship with his parents, for myriad reasons, but he’s very close to his younger sister.

Daphne and Miles’ story starts as they navigate their newly single lives now that their exes are dating ... each other.

They go through the throes of grieving together, with a soundtrack of love songs accompanying each phase. It's practically begging for a movie version, to go along with the several other Henry books already in various stages of production.

Early on, they decide to pretend they’re dating to make their exes jealous. But as time goes on, they discover that they see each other as more than friends, that they really are falling for each other.

“Funny Story” is Henry’s latest romance — and her steamiest one so far. It’s a mixture of will-they-won’t-they in a way that makes you really want them to. They’re the protagonists in separate love stories who are brought together by heartbreak. Daphne and Miles are characters you can empathize with and root for.

And “Funny Story” is classic Henry. It’s a meet-cute in a non-patronizing way. It’s a modern love story, and one that you won’t be mad is slightly predictable — because it makes you feel good and makes you believe in a thing called love.

“So many of the most beautiful things in life are unexpected,” Henry writes.

It’s funny how life and love are both that way.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

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Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side? A Literature Review

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The rapid legalization of marijuana has greatly affected this country, and it would be foolish to not acknowledge that. The legalization has led to widespread changes in the criminal court system, a new cultural acceptance of the substance, and one of most debated topics in modern American politics. This literature review aims to synthesize five different scientific articles about marijuana. These articles focus on different aspects of marijuana. Some of the articles focus on the physical effects of the substance, while others focus on social situations (like marijuana in the workplace). Two conclusions can be drawn from the five articles. One, marijuana is detrimental, despite the popular belief that it is not; two, much more research is needed in this area. Finally, it is important to note that all five articles are unbiased, and they are not written by politicians, policy makers, or opinionated journalists.

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