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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Essay on 21st Century Literature

Students are often asked to write an essay on 21st Century Literature in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on 21st Century Literature

What is 21st century literature.

21st Century Literature is writing from the year 2000 onwards. It includes novels, poems, and plays. This period is marked by the use of digital technology and cultural diversity. Writers use the internet to share their work. They also explore themes like identity, globalization, and technology.

Features of 21st Century Literature

This literature is known for its variety. It has a mix of different styles, genres, and themes. Many books deal with real-world issues. They talk about politics, social changes, and personal struggles. Writers use simple language to express complex ideas.

Impact of Technology

Technology has a big role in this literature. Writers use it to create new forms of storytelling. E-books and audiobooks are popular. Online platforms allow writers to reach a global audience. They can also interact with readers in real-time.

Representation and Diversity

21st Century Literature is rich in diversity. It includes voices from different cultures, races, and genders. This literature challenges old ideas and promotes equality. It helps us understand different perspectives and experiences.

250 Words Essay on 21st Century Literature

Introduction to 21st century literature.

21st century literature is the writing that’s been created from the year 2000 to now. It’s a time of great change and new thoughts. It’s a time when writers have more freedom and creativity than ever before.

One key feature of 21st century literature is diversity. Many writers from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences are sharing their stories. This means you’ll find books about all kinds of people and places.

Technology’s Impact

Technology has also played a big role in shaping 21st century literature. With the internet and social media, writers can share their work with the world instantly. This has led to new types of writing, like blogs and tweets, becoming part of literature.

Themes and Genres

In terms of themes, 21st century literature often deals with issues like identity, diversity, and change. Also, many new genres have emerged, such as young adult fiction and graphic novels.

In conclusion, 21st century literature is rich and diverse. It reflects our changing world and the many voices within it. It’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer.

500 Words Essay on 21st Century Literature

Topics and themes.

One of the key features of 21st Century Literature is the variety of topics it covers. Writers from all over the world have been telling stories about different cultures, experiences, and views. Many books talk about important issues like climate change, social justice, and mental health. These are topics that people care about a lot today.

Style and Form

The way stories are told in 21st Century Literature is also very different. Writers have been playing with the form and structure of their books. Some books might not have a clear start, middle, and end. Others might use different points of view or mix up the timeline. This makes the books more interesting and gives readers new ways to think about the story.

Influence of Technology

21st Century Literature is also known for its focus on representation and diversity. Writers are telling stories about people from all walks of life. This includes people of different races, religions, genders, and sexual orientations. These stories help us understand and appreciate the experiences of people who might be different from us.

In conclusion, 21st Century Literature is a rich and exciting field. It covers a wide range of topics and uses new and innovative ways to tell stories. It’s influenced by technology and focused on representation and diversity. As readers, we’re lucky to have so many interesting books to choose from. As we move further into the 21st Century, it will be exciting to see how literature continues to evolve.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Part 4: Romantic and (Post)Modernist Culture

4.101: postmodern and 21st century literature in america, postmodernity/postmodernism.

Our current period in history has been called by many the postmodern age (or “postmodernity”) and many contemporary critics are understandably interested in making sense of the time in which they live. Although an admirable endeavor, such critics inevitably run into difficulties given the sheer complexity of living in history: we do not yet know which elements in our culture will win out and we do not always recognize the subtle but insistent ways that changes in our society affect our ways of thinking and being in the world. One symptom of the present’s complexity is just how divided critics are on the question of postmodern culture, with a number of critics celebrating our liberation and a number of others lamenting our enslavement….

One of the problems in dealing with postmodernism is in distinguishing it from modernism. In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression. In this way, postmodern artistic forms can be seen as an extension of modernist experimentation; however, others prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break, one that is a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (especially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer. Many date postmodernity from the sixties when we witnessed the rise of postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see WWII as the radical break from modernity, since the horrors of Nazism (and of other modernist revolutions like communism and Maoism) were made evident at this time. The very term “postmodern” was, in fact, coined in the forties by the historian, Arnold Toynbee. ( Click this link for more about the aforementioned aspects of postmodernism.)

Postmodernist Literature

Postmodernism is difficult to define. Don DeLillo is recognized as one of America’s premier postmodernist novelists, yet he rejects the term entirely. “If I had to classify myself,” he explains in a 2010 interview in the  Saint Louis Beacon , “it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.”

DeLillo in New York City, 2011

Literally, the term postmodernism refers to culture that comes after Modernism, referring specifically to works of art created in the decades following the 1950s. The term’s most precise definition comes from architecture, where it refers to a contemporary style of building that rejects the austerity and minimalism of modernist architecture’s glass boxes and towers; postmodernist architects retain the functionalist core of the modernist building but then decorate their boxes and towers with playful colors, forms, and ornaments that reference disparate historical eras. Indeed, play with media and materials, and with forms, styles, and content is one of the chief characteristics of postmodernist art.

While postmodernist architects play with the material of their buildings, postmodernist writers play with the material that their poems and stories are made of, namely language and the book. Postmodernist writers freely use all the challenging experimental literary techniques developed by the modernists earlier in the twentieth century as well as new, even more experimental techniques of their own invention. In fiction, many postmodernist authors adopt the self-referential style of “ metafiction ,” a story that is just as much about the process of telling a story as it is about describing characters and events. Donald Barthelme’s postmodernist short story, “The School,” contains metafictional elements that comment on the process of storytelling and meaning-making, as when the narrator describes how the “lesson plan called for tropical fish input” even though all the students in the schoolroom knew the fish would soon die. Who is telling this story? Bartheleme? The unnamed narrator? The lesson plan? The stories that make up history itself are often a playground for postmodernist authors, as they take material found in history books and weave it into new tales that reveal secret histories and dimly perceived conspiracies. David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” is a good example of the narrative excess found in postmodern literature. In this essay written for  Gourmet  magazine, Wallace uses his visit to the Maine Lobster Festival to tell a history of the lobster since the Jurassic period that eventually turns against the organizers of the festival themselves, who may or may not be covering up the truth about how much lobsters suffer in their cooking pots. The form of the essay cannot even contain Wallace’s ideas, which spill over into twenty excessively long footnotes, many of which are little essays in themselves. In addition to playing with the form of literature and the notion of authorship, postmodernist writers also often play with popular sub-genres such as the detective story, horror, and science fiction. For example, in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich evokes both the detective story and science fiction as she imagines a futuristic diver visiting a deep sea wreck in order to solve the mystery of why literature and history have been mostly about men and not women.

Not all works of postmodernist literature are stylistically experimental or playful. Rather, their authors explore the meaning and value of postmodernity as a cultural condition. Several philosophers and literary critics many of whose names have become synonymous with postmodernism itself have helped us understand what the postmodern condition may be. “Poststructuralist” philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard have argued that words and texts do not reflect the world but instead exist as their own self-referential systems, containing and even creating the world they describe. When we perceive the world, Derrida’s philosophy of “deconstruction” claims, we see not things but “signs” that can be understood only through their relation to other signs. “There is no outside the text,” Derrida famously claimed in his book  Of Grammatology  (1967). In this way, words and books and texts are powerful things, for in them our world itself is created an insight that many postmodernist creative writers share. Baudrillard, in turn, argues in his book,  Simulacra and Simulation  (1981), that the real world has been filled up with and even replaced by simulations that we now treat as reality: simulacra. These postmodern sensibilities are reflected in both Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” and our selection from DeLillo’s  White Noise . In Ginsberg’s poem, food has become “brilliant stacks of cans” knowable only by their similarity to each other. The “neon fruit supermarket” is not even a simulation of a real farm but instead is a simulacra full of families who have probably never even seen a farm. In DeLillo’s novel, we find the insight that the collected photographs of “the most photographed barn in America” are more real than the physical barn being photographed. Nobody knows why this particular barn is the most photographed barn in America. The barn is famous simply because it is a much-copied text, valued more as a sign in relation to other signs (all those photos of the same thing) than as a thing in itself with a specific history and a particular use. In his book  Postmodernism  (1991), the leftist critic Frederic Jameson chastises postmodernism for being the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” which for him is a culture that erases the real meanings and relations of things such as the most photographed barn in America, replacing true history with nostalgic simulacra.

Read this excerpt about “the most photographed barn in America” from DeLillo’s  White Noise  (1985):

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”

The culture of postmodernism in general exhibits a skepticism towards the grand truth claims and unifying narratives that have organized culture since the time of the Enlightenment. In postmodern culture, history becomes a field of competing histories and the self becomes a hybrid being with multiple, partial identities. In his provocative study,  The Postmodern Condition  (1979), the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard argues that what defines the present postmodern historical era is the collapse of “grand narratives” that explain all experience, faiths, and truths, such as those found in science, politics, and religion; in place of all-explaining master narratives, he argues, we now know the world through smaller micro-narratives that don’t all fit together into a greater coherent whole.

These insights are thoroughly explored in the confessional, feminist, and multicultural American literature of this era, whose authors write from their subjective points of view rather than presuming to represent the sum total of all American experiences, and whose works show us that American history has been far from the same experience for all Americans. For example, both Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke have poems about their fathers, but their appreciation of their respective fathers is shaped by both their genders and their own personal histories. Roethke feels a kinship with his father. Plath, however, sees her father as an enemy. The Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko tells her story specifically from the point of view of a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, whose members use old stories about the Yellow Woman and the ka’tsina spirit to understand their tribe’s relationship to the rest of America. In the works of African-American literature in this section, we find similar explorations of cultural identity.

Read these excerpts from  Almanac of the Dead  (1991) by Leslie Marmon Silko:

James Baldwin uses the African-American music of the blues and jazz to describe the relationship between the two brothers in his story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Ralph Ellison, in the first chapter from his novel  Invisible Man  (1952), writes about the experience of attending a segregated school that keeps black Americans separate from white Americans. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, in their stories, explore the hybrid nature of African-American identity itself, showing us the tensions that arise when one’s identity is both American and black.

The varied, playful, experimental literature of postmodernism, the critic Brian McHale helpfully observes in his book  Constructing Postmodernism  (1993), presents readers not with many ways to know our one world but instead with many knowable worlds created within many disparate works in many different ways. Modernist authors all strove to devise new techniques with which to accurately represent the world, McHale observes. Postmodernist authors, however, are no longer concerned with representing one knowable world but instead with creating many literary worlds that represent a diversity of experiences. Thus, much as the American literature of the contemporary era presents us with a record of how the nation has known, questioned, and even redefined itself, so too does the literature of postmodernism present us with a record of how writers have known, questioned, and even redefined what literature is.

Literature in the 21st Century

In many ways, the literature of this century is still postmodern, as it challenges grand narratives, monolithic constructions of identity, and many traditions and techniques of literature of the past. (And if it is not, there is no term for what is post-postmodern!) One motif that has persisted and proliferated during this century revolves around the impact of technology on the topics postmodern writers addressed in the latter part of the 21st century. Cyberpunk , which dealt with the “down and out” struggling to survive or transform a dystopian setting in which technology both empowers and enslaves, and which rose to prominence in the 1980s with authors such as William Gibson, Pat Cadagin, and Bruce Sterling, set the groundwork for this genre.

William Gibson at a 2007 reading from his new book Spook Country at Bolen Books in Victoria BC Canada.

Fiction writers such as Alaya Dawn Johnson continue to question essentializing of sexual identity and practice, and a patriarchal, if not-so-dystopian society in a work such as The Summer Prince . Larissa Lai considers the same kind of topics with the integration and, at times, through the lens of Chinese mythology. The Circle by David Eggers confronts the loss of privacy and authentic selfhood via technology, and the question of if progress or self-definition is more important in an ever speeding up world. And M.T. Anderson’s Feed calls into question the supposed utopia of a world proming instant gratification at the expense of destroying the environment, dumbing down the citizenry, and a general loss of humanity.

Johnson in 2013

In drama Jennifer Haley has written plays suggesting there today exists a blurring of the material and digital in relation to video games ( Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom ) and virtual reality ( The Nether ). And Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime addresses the possibilities and limitations of technology for filling the gap of losing a loved one and preserving one’s “existence” after death.

What this era is and will be known as is still unclear, and the dominance of visual and aural narrative forms is likely pushing the written narrative to a less pervasive and influential role than anytime before the emergence of the alphabet. But, then again, what constitutes literature is also changing with the times, as everything from video games to websites have been analyzed as forms of literature this century. So, maybe this is a transformational time for literature and we will just have to wait to see how the changes play out.

• Postmodernism. Authored by : Amy Berke, et al.. Provided by : LibreTexts. Located at : https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature_and_Literacy/Book%3A_Writing_the_Nation_-_A_Concise_Introduction_to_American_Literature_1865_to_Present_(Berke%2C_Bleil_and_Cofer)/06%3A_American_Literature_Since_1945_(1945_-_Present)/6.06%3A_Postmodernism . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Authored by : Thousand Robots. Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo#/media/File:Don_delillo_nyc_02-cropped.jpg . License : CC BY: Attribution
• Uncle Gibby. Authored by : Dylan Parker . Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson#/media/File:Uncle_Gibby.jpg . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
• Johnson in 2013. Authored by : Luigi Novi. Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaya_Dawn_Johnson#/media/File:6.30.13AlayaJohnsonByLuigiNovi1.jpg . License : CC BY: Attribution
• General Introduction to the Postmodern. Authored by : Dino Franco Felluga. Provided by : Purdue University. Located at : https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/introduction.html . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
• The Most Photographed Barn in America Exerpts from White Noise by Don DeLillo. Authored by : Benjamin Mako Hill. Provided by : WordPress. Located at : https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/extra/most_photographed_barn_in_america.html . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Authored by : Theresa Delgadillo. Provided by : WordPress. Located at : https://library.osu.edu/site/mujerestalk/2014/08/12/contending-worldviews-in-leslie-marmon-silkos-almanac-of-the-dead/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
• Literature in the 21st Century and Conclusion. Authored by : Steven Hymowech. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-fmcc-hum140/chapter/4-101-postmodern-literature/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
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2 The Value of Literature

• Published: November 2004
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This chapter first looks at the value and definition of art as it should and can be if ever it has moral value. The chapter asks the question why and how are artistic and literary activity morally valuable and excellent? For this question to merit an answer, two issues are addressed in the chapter. The first issue is the relationship of beauty to truth and goodness. In what ways are they compatible? The second issue deals with the uniqueness of beauty and in what ways is it different from the true and the good. For example, In the Republic , Plato speaks of the artist as an imitator twice removed from reality. In that sense, what we today call reality may have implications of deception in such a way that it blocks us from understanding a more essential meaning, a more genuine reality. This initiates the chapter's search for the truth and goodness of literature and literary criticism.

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C21 Literature Special Issue: The Century at 25

An exit out of the 'hive': post-apocalyptic fictions of data capitalism and technological acceleration.

Rebecca Bevington (University of York)

Linda Grant's Dys-Chrony: Interwoven Temporalities in A Stranger City (2019)

Ulla Rahbek (University of Copenhagen)

The Body that Writes: Gender, Class and the Abject Female Body in Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites (2013)

Kiriaki Massoura (Northumbria University)

Ways of Looking: The Composite Novel and Posthuman Community in Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13

Adele Guyton (KU Leuven)

The Writing of Ruins: Beckett, Late Modernism, and the Inhuman in Don DeLillo’s Postmillennial Fiction

Marc Farrant (University of Amsterdam)

Spreading the Word: What Fifty Shades of Grey Means for World Literature

Waiyee Loh (Kanagawa University)

#MeToo and the Northern Ireland Troubles: Anna Burns' Milkman

Matt McGuire (Western Sydney University)

C21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings is the journal of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS). The journal is dedicated to examining the genres, forms of publication, and circulation of 21st-century writings. C21 Literature is a logical development of the explosion of interest in 21st-century writings, seen in book groups, university courses, and the development of online publishing.

Volume 11 • Issue 1 • 2024 • Spring 2024

Rebecca Bevington

2024-01-17 Volume 11 • Issue 1 • 2024 • Spring 2024

Migration and the Dystopian Imagination of European Border Regimes

2024-02-28 Volume 11 • Issue 1 • 2024 • Spring 2024

Jennifer Cooke, Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 234 pages, £83.99 (hardback)

Ines Garcia

2024-05-07 Volume 11 • Issue 1 • 2024 • Spring 2024

Kristian Shaw, Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Wiktoria Maria Tunska

Posted by Dr Caroline Edwards on 2024-01-18

The twenty-first century is nearly a quarter done. The contemporary – that category which has so often been theorised, following Barthes and Agamben, as fundamentally out of step with its own time – is starting to synchronise its watch with the temporal bounds of the current century. Despite a flurry of critical efforts to name, characterise, and categorise the paradigm shifts of the present in [...]

Posted by Siân Adiseshiah on 2022-09-16

We are pleased to announce that C21 is advertising for two positions: 1) a Deputy Editor and 2) a Reviews Editor. Both these roles require some prior experience of editorial work, peer review, or academic writing and communications. C21 already has two Deputy Editors but is creating an opening for a third to share the workload so each role is not too onerous. An opening [...]

Posted by Dr Caroline Edwards on 2022-07-07

We're delighted to announce the re-launch of C21!After ten years of managing the journal, Professor Katy Shaw is standing down as Editor-in-Chief. The British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies has appointed two new Editors-in-Chief: Dr Siân Adiseshiah (Loughborough University) and Dr Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London). They join the current team of Deputy Editors, [...]

Posted by Katy Shaw on 2021-02-02

C21 Literature is seeking NEW article submissions for 2021.Please read the journal submission guidelines and the scope of the journal pages on this site, or take a look at our database of previous publications before submitting. If you have any questions relating to a future submission, please email our Editor: Professor Katy Shaw [email protected] also welcome expressions of [...]

Posted by Katy Shaw on 2020-12-10

Essential? Different? Exceptional? The Book Trade and Covid-19by Professor Claire Squires, University of Stirling, UKFor many - probably all readers on this platform - a book is an essential Christmas gift to give or receive. Those rectangular objects, so bibliographically obvious nestled in their wrapping paper under the Christmas tree, also form delightful seasonal and familial [...]

Literature in the 21st Century

Coordinators.

Prof. dr. Ellen Rutten, Dr. Arent van Nieukerken, Dr. Eric Metz

Members of the research group

Carrol Clarkson, Yra van Dijk, Shelley Godsland, Christ-Maria Lerm Hayes, Eric Metz, Divya Nadkarni, Arent van Nieukerken, Esther Peeren, Suze van der Poll, Ellen Rutten,  Jenny Stelleman, Thomas Vaessens, Philip Westbroek.

Description of the research programme of the research group

The research group ‘Literary Studies in the 21 st  Century’ focuses on the description, categorization and analysis of various types of “literariness” that have developed just before and after 2000. Hitherto, academic research of 21 st -century literature has largely focused on grasping general cultural processes: literary texts have usually – and fruitfully – been employed as illustrating the rhythms of cultural change. Much less attention has been devoted to the development and/or evolvement of various types of “literariness” as a specific feature of these general processes. However, the relationship between individual literary phenomena (poems, novels, plays, essays) and the realm of cultural narrations is essentially mediated by a “middle ground” of  literary  conventions, such as generic conventions, narrative structures, stylistic devices etc. The relative neglect of this field of studies in the discourse of cultural studies – a discourse that not seldomly overlooks the categories elaborated by twentieth- century (post-)structuralist narratology and poetics – has led to many misrepresentations, not only of the immanent development of various local literary traditions, but also of their transnational and transregional interaction. Our research group aims to correct one-sidedness by exploring “multivoiced” ( à la  Bakhtin) representations of literariness as a major branch of cultural transformation in the new millennium.

The research questions that the group will critically address include the following two:

• How do 21 st -century authors relate to trans-Atlantic postmodernism in its different phases? In answering this question we explore the interaction between both positive views of postmodernism (as a universal model of cultural “progress” and “emancipation) and negative interpretations (of postmodernism as boasting a “disintegrating” impact that, e.g., home-grown literary traditions can combat)?
• How do contemporary literary authors engage with previous phases of cultural narrations? Relevant examples of engagement with existing paradigms include the wish to return to “Christian European culture” or different forms of “positivist” anti- relativism.

Investigating the “literariness” just before and after 2000 from a transnational (and trans- regional) point of view will modify – and enrich – existing representations of the afore- mentioned cultural processes. Local models of literary currents differing from – and modifying – the mainstream can only be pinpointed by studying artistic and critical texts from a number of local literatures that are not always easily available in translation. An adequate presentation of these texts presupposes an intimate knowledge of the local languages and culture that can only be accomplished by a research group, uniting experts from a wide field of national – and regional – literary traditions. During monthly seminars the members of the research group will give presentations devoted to: 1. examining the various types of new millennium “literariness” in national literatures; 2. describing and comparing them in the context of larger cultural narratives; 3. investigating the relationship between national “literariness” and larger (e.g. regional) literary and cultural entities.

Societal Relevance

In recent years, several literary experts – academic and non-academic alike – have argued that in the 21 st  century, literature has regained its role as commentator  and  constructing force in social and political processes. Although social commitment should not be considered a  sine  qua non  for all the trends that we explore, as a whole 21 st  literature does testify to a heightened awareness of social and political dilemmas. This research group places the renewed engagement high on its agenda not only by addressing it in in-group discussions, but also by framing its concluding conference emphatically as a public event – one where academic speakers alternate with literary critics and writers, and where a broad audience is welcomed and invited to participate.

This research group is active in the following constellations:

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A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon

A panel of critics tells us what belongs on a list of the 100 most important books of the 2000s … so far..

Okay, assessing a century’s literary legacy after only 18 and a half years is kind of a bizarre thing to do.

Actually, constructing a canon of any kind is a little weird at the moment, when so much of how we measure cultural value is in flux. Born of the ancient battle over which stories belonged in the “canon” of the Bible, the modern literary canon took root in universities and became defined as the static product of consensus — a set of leather-bound volumes you could shoot into space to make a good first impression with the aliens. Its supposed permanence became the subject of more recent battles, back in the 20th century, between those who defended it as the foundation of Western civilization and those who attacked it as exclusive or even racist.

But what if you could start a canon from scratch? We thought it might be fun to speculate (very prematurely) on what a canon of the 21st century might look like right now. A couple of months ago, we reached out to dozens of critics and authors — well-established voices (Michiko Kakutani, Luc Sante), more radical thinkers (Eileen Myles), younger reviewers for outlets like n+1 , and some of our best-read contributors, too. We asked each of them to name several books that belong among the most important 100 works of fiction, memoir, poetry, and essays since 2000 and tallied the results. The purpose was not to build a fixed library but to take a blurry selfie of a cultural moment.

Any project like this is arbitrary, and ours is no exception. But the time frame is not quite as random as it may seem. The aughts and teens represent a fairly coherent cultural period, stretching from the eerie decadence of pre-9/11 America to the presidency of Donald Trump. This mini-era packed in the political, social, and cultural shifts of the average century, while following the arc of an epic narrative (perhaps a tragedy, though we pray for a happier sequel). Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections , one of our panel’s favorite books, came out ten days before the World Trade Center fell; subsequent novels reflected that cataclysm’s destabilizing effects, the waves of hope and despair that accompanied wars, economic collapse, permanent-seeming victories for the once excluded, and the vicious backlash under which we currently shudder. They also reflected the fragmentation of culture brought about by social media. The novels of the Trump era await their shot at the canon of the future; because of the time it takes to write a book, we haven’t really seen them yet.

You never know exactly what you’ll discover when sending out a survey like this, the results of which owe something to chance and a lot to personal predilections. But given the sheer volume of stuff published each year, it is remarkable that a survey like this would yield any kind of consensus—which this one did. Almost 40 books got more than one endorsement, and 13 had between three and seven apiece. We have separately listed the single-most popular book; the dozen “classics” with several votes; the “high canon” of 26 books with two votes each; and the rest of the still-excellent but somewhat more contingent canon-in-utero. (To better reflect that contingency, we’ve included a handful of critics’ “dissents,” arguing for alternate books by the canonized authors.)

Unlike the old canons, ours is roughly half-female, less diverse than it should be but generally preoccupied with difference, and so fully saturated with what we once called “genre fiction” that we hardly even think of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road , Colson Whitehead’s zombie comedy Zone One , Helen Oyeyemi’s subversive fairy tales, or even the Harry Potter novels as deserving any other designation than “literature.” And a whole lot of them are, predictably, about instability, the hallmark of the era after the “end of history” that we call now.

At least one distinctive new style has dominated over the past decade. Call it autofiction if you like, but it’s really a collapsing of categories. (Perhaps not coincidentally, such lumping is better suited to “People Who Liked” algorithms than brick-and-mortar shelving systems.) This new style encompasses Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels; Sheila Heti’s self-questing How Should a Person Be? ; Karl Ove Knausgaard’s just-completed 3,600-page experiment in radical mundanity; the essay-poems of Claudia Rankine on race and the collage­like reflections of Maggie Nelson on gender. It’s not really a genre at all. It’s a way of examining the self and letting the world in all at once. Whether it changes the world is, as always with books, not really the point. It helps us see more clearly.

Our dozen “classics” do represent some consensus; their genius seems settled-on. Among them are Kazuo Ishiguro’s scary portrait of replicant loneliness in Never Let Me Go ; Roberto Bolaño’s epic and powerfully confrontational 2666 ; Joan Didion’s stark self-dissection of grief in The Year of Magical Thinking . They aren’t too surprising, because they are (arguably as always, but still) great.

And then there’s The Last Samurai , Helen DeWitt’s debut: published at the start of the century, relegated to obscurity (and overshadowed by a bad and unrelated Tom Cruise movie of the same name), and now celebrated by more members of our panel than any other book. That’s still only seven out of 31, which gives you a sense of just how fragile this consensus is. Better not launch this canon into space just yet.

— Boris Kachka

The Best Book of the Century (for Now)

By Christian Lorentzen

The Last Samurai , by Helen DeWitt (September 20, 2000)

Ask a set of writers and critics to select books for a new canon, and it shouldn’t come as a shock that the one most of them name is a novel about the nature of genius. It is also, more precisely, a novel about universal human potential.

Like many epics, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai charts the education of its hero and proceeds by means of a quest narrative. A boy undertakes rigorous training and goes in search of his father. What makes it a story of our time is that the boy lives in an insufficiently heated London flat with a single mother. What makes it singular is that his training begins at age 4, when he starts to learn ancient Greek, before quickly moving on to Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Finnish, etc. That’s not to mention his acquisition of mathematics, physics, art history, music, and an eccentric taste for tales of world exploration.

Is this boy, Ludo, a genius? Sibylla, his mother, is of two minds about it. She recognizes that she’s done something out of the ordinary by teaching the kid The Iliad so young, following the example of J.S. Mill, who did Greek at age 3. She knows he’s a “Boy Wonder” and she encourages him in every way to follow his omnivorous instincts. But she also believes that the problem with everybody else — literally everybody else — is that they haven’t been properly taught and have gone out of their way, most of the time, to avoid difficult things, like thinking. Otherwise we’d be living in a world of Ludos.

So a novel that appears on the surface to be elitist — concerned as it is with great works of art, scientific achievement, and excellence generally — is actually profoundly anti-elitist at its core. DeWitt’s novel is infused with the belief that any human mind is capable of feats we tend to associate with genius. But the novel’s characters, especially Sibylla, are aware that youthful talent can be thwarted at any turn. She knows it happened to her parents — a teenage-whiz father who was accepted to Harvard but made to go to seminary by his Christian father; and a musical prodigy mother who never went back to Juilliard for a second audition — and to herself. Whatever the world had in store for Sibylla changed forever the night Ludo was conceived.

• SEE THE FULL ESSAY

The 12 New Classics

Per our panel.

The Corrections , by Jonathan Franzen (September 1, 2001) | 6 votes Arriving in bookstores ten days before the September 11 attacks, The Corrections recounts the tragicomic breakdown of a 20th-century American dream of middle-ness: midwestern and middle-class. The Lamberts, with their mentally disintegrating patriarch, Christmas-obsessed mother, and grown siblings tackling depression, professional failure, adultery, and celebrity chefdom, may not seem as universal as they once did, but the sensation of certainties evaporating as we pitch headlong into this still-young century has only gotten stronger. —Laura Miller

DISSENT: Freedom (August 31, 2010) I prefer this in large measure because it focuses on a feature of human life that has gotten less fictional coverage than family and love: male friendship. Sure, it’s a love story between Patty and Walter and then between Patty and Richard, but it’s also a love story between Walter and Richard, two friends fiercely at odds and no less fiercely close. To say that the emotional high-note, and the real shocker, of this nearly 600-page novel is a gift that one man makes for his friend is to say that Franzen, who too many people say gets too much credit, doesn’t get enough for what he actually manages to do : reveal the tender, unexpected workings of human animals. —Wyatt Mason

Never Let Me Go , by Kazuo Ishiguro (March 3, 2005)  | 6 votes You can think of this as Ishiguro’s The Road — his haunting masterpiece. The ratio of taut plot to ghastly subject matter is disturbingly effective. Kathy H.’s multidimensional but methodical storytelling of this adolescent Gothic horror show is indelible (and difficult to review without spoiling). The questions it raises are perfectly of-our-century. Never Let Me Go is a prime example of an author with impeccable taste in ideas and the control to execute them. Most authors are lucky if they have one of those things going for them. This novel is a rare symphony of both. —Sloane Crosley

How Should a Person Be? , by Sheila Heti (September 25, 2010)   |  5 votes Heti doesn’t get enough credit from her advocates for being funny or from her critics for being serious. Slipping imperceptibly from ironic to earnest, challenging to chatty, her voice is sui generis and ideally suited to capturing the experience of making art — and decisions — in the modern world. The concerns of her breakout work of autofiction include sex, self-documentation, aesthetics, and friendship, as well as the titular question. The title is a perfect joke, a mission statement of deranged grandiosity, straight-faced and self-aware. Isn’t this what every book, ever, wants (in its own way) to ask? —Molly Fischer

The Neapolitan Novels, by Elena Ferrante (2011-2015) | 5 votes Elena Ferrante’s Italy is where the personal is political, the male gaze is visceral, and the past clings to the present with potent force. Across four books and over the lifetimes of its two unforgettable main characters, the Neapolitan quartet explores female rage, agency, and friendship with a raw power. (All that over a decade when women have begun to express their anger and agency in new ways.) Lila and Elena grow up inured to the violence and corruption that defines their hometown of Naples in the 1950s, even as they yearn for something better: beauty amidst the ugliness, and intellectual fulfillment, which can be as heady as romantic love. Ferrante fever struck readers all over the world, captivated by Lila and Elena’s complicated relationship. —Maris Kreizman

The Argonauts , by Maggie Nelson (May 5, 2015) |  5 votes Around the time it was published, Maggie Nelson read aloud the opening of this book — an extremely graphic and surprising sex scene, awkwardly lighting up that New York room and clanging a bell that people had just not heard before. Her 21st-century classic is structurally just that kind of awoke re-shuffling. It’s not that you don’t know about anal sex, childbirth, or even about a partner’s transition or a parent dying, but Nelson puts each next to the other in a manner that changes our perception of each and all. I’m always glad to have never had a baby, yet Maggie has writ birthing so deeply that I’m grateful to say I’ve missed nothing in this life, thanks to this uncanny saint of a book. —Eileen Myles

2666 , by Roberto Bolaño (November 11, 2008) | 4 votes Bolaño’s final legacy to the world before his death in 2003 is a labyrinthine mystery taking in three continents and most of the 20th century. Its playful first part might make you think you are stepping into a steady old-fashioned cruise ship of a novel, à la Victor Hugo, but the tone shifts as abruptly as the locale. At its center is the book-length fourth part, a mercilessly clipped recital of some of the hundreds of femicides in Ciudad Juárez, which is both integral to the story and a direct confrontation with the reader. The book is a world: teeming, immeasurable, unplumbable, materially solid but finally enigmatic. —Luc Sante

DISSENT: The Savage Detectives (March 4, 2008) I have always preferred this precursor to 2666 , which is its closest (though much slimmer) competitor in scope. The polyphonic tour de force is peak Bolaño, the purest distillation of its author’s disparate obsessions: the collision of the Old World with the New, mezcal , road trips, Surrealism, sacrifice in lifelong pursuit of art (and the authoritarian urge seeded in creative failure), fraudulence, unrecognized genius, and the maddening and fleeting allure of youth. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Sellout , by Paul Beatty (March 3, 2015) |  4 votes It takes a master of language, culture, and comic timing to create a satire that excoriates contemporary American life, with jokes coming at a furious pace, almost line by line. The novel takes on the idea of living in a “post-racial” society, which even during the Obama administration was ridiculous. The Sellout details the trials of a black man charged with reinstating slavery and segregation in his California hometown, in a voice that is unabashedly profane; so unflinchingly silly and smart that it’s impossible to look away. —Maris Kreizman

The Outline Trilogy ( Outline , Transit , and Kudos ), by Rachel Cusk (2014–2018) |  4 votes In its basic contours, Cusk’s trilogy is a masterpiece of rigorous denial: The books, mostly plotless, follow a British writer named Faye about whom we learn little. Yet Faye is less a protagonist than a character-shaped black hole, pulling stories and confessions out of everyone she encounters as if by inexorable gravitational force. Their disclosures allow Cusk to examine the ways we try (and fail) to make meaning out of life. The result is fiction like ice water, cold and clear, a mirror of our time. —Molly Fischer

Atonement , by Ian McEwan (September 2001) |  3 votes At once a war story, a love story, and a story about the destructive and redemptive powers of the imagination, Atonement pivots around a terrible lie told by a 13-year-old girl that will shatter her family. At the same time, the novel opens out into a deeply moving portrait of England careerning from the quiescent 1930s into the horrors of World War II. A bravura account of the 1940 Allied retreat from Dunkirk stands as one of the most indelible combat scenes in recent literature, slamming home the confusion, terror, and banality of war with visceral immediacy. It is only the most memorable sequence in a brilliantly orchestrated novel that injects many of the author’s favorite themes — the hazards of innocence, the sudden intrusion of bad luck into ordinary lives, the blurring of lines between art and life — with a new resonance and depth. —Michiko Kakutani

The Year of Magical Thinking , by Joan Didion (September 1, 2005) |  3 votes This is often referred to as Didion’s “departure” — the underbelly everyone always longed to see after reading Slouching Towards Bethlehem and thinking: But surely she’d pick me. Surely we’d live happily ever after, observing the world with our cool eyes. In short: No, she wouldn’t. And The Year of Magical Thinking is actually not her “personal” anomaly. It’s the Didion that’s been there all along — funny, humane, trenchant — transformed by tragedy and grief. The 21st century is young, but this one will be on this list 50 years from now. There’s something so reassuring about a bar that can never be surpassed. —Sloane Crosley

Leaving the Atocha Station , by Ben Lerner (August 23, 2011) |  3 votes When our alien overlords want to know what was new in the novel in the first quarter of the 21st century, give them Atocha Station . Some will contend that Lerner’s second novel, 10:04 , is a more mature work, but this one is leaner and shapelier, and more directly explores the disconnect between our hopes for art and our actual experience of it. The narrator, a self-loathing stoner American poet on a fellowship in Madrid, is a privileged jackass trying to appear deep. The trick, of course, is that he’s brilliant, and his anxious stream of thought is philosophically rich. What is the average person’s role in history? How can we live with our own fraudulence? Why should we make art, and what kind of art can we make now? To all these questions Atocha Station is an answer. —Christine Smallwood

DISSENT: 10:04 (September 2, 2014) 10:04 is the story of a poet and novelist (the author of a book very much like Leaving the Atocha Station ) as he contemplates in vitro uncoupled parenthood, radical politics, fleeting love, and a looming, potentially lethal arterial condition. Lerner moves from touristic escapism and the question of artistic fraudulence to the deeper burdens of settling, reproducing, and creating something great. On top of that he gives the much bemoaned Brooklyn novel a good name. —Christian Lorentzen

The Flamethrowers , by Rachel Kushner (April 2, 2013) |  3 votes This fever-dream of the 1970s would make a spectacular movie — if anyone had the budget to make a picture that takes in speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats, vast street riots in Rome, escapes through the Alps, and intrigue in the international art world. Kushner sets her heroine, Reno, in the middle of all of it, usually astride her battered Moto Valera; passionate, vulnerable, relentlessly curious, and only a little bit compromised. The book is a feminist action-adventure, a love note to the last decade before neoliberalism choked the world, and a monument to sheer gumption. —Luc Sante

The High Canon

Books endorsed by two panelists.

Erasure , by Percival Everett (August 1, 2001) The University of Southern California English professor has published some 30 volumes, mostly fiction, and Erasure is among his best. A comic romp through academic pieties and perversities, it centers on a literary hoax gone bad, in ways that predicted our current higher-educational climate. Everett is always, in a sense, writing about race, and always not. (He also writes about himself — and not — with a Hitchcock-like cameo in the form of a derelict-in-his-duty, wastrel of a literature professor by the name of Percival Everett.) —Tom Lutz

Middlesex , by Jeffrey Eugenides (September 4, 2002) “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome,” proclaims Cal/Calliope Stephanides, Middlesex ’s pseudo-hermaphroditic protagonist, recounting his family’s long hereditary slide towards her mixed-up gender identity. And then: “Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That’s genetic, too.” Eugenides packs so much richness into this Classical saga-cum-bildungsroman-cum–paean to the American Dream that Dickens would be proud. Starting with the burning of Smyrna and winding its way through Prohibition to the 1967 Detroit race riots, Middlesex does what any viable candidate for the Great American Novel should; it broadens the definition of “American.” —Hillary Kelly

Platform , by Michel Houellebecq (September 5, 2002) Houellebecq’s second novel (after his incendiary debut, The Elementary Particles ) is full of loathsome, corrosive wit; it continues his savagely pessimistic project exploring the future of France (and, by extension, Europe and the West), caught between the distractions of late capitalism and the amorality of a post-1968 society. Houellebecq is abrasive, offensive, and in many ways obviously wrong, but his grim outlook on globalization and his anger at his parents’ generation make him one of the essential European novelists of the 21st century. —Jess Row

Do Everything in the Dark , by Gary Indiana (June 1, 2003) A working title for this novel was “Psychotic Friends Network.” Composed in 74 short sections, it follows a group of loosely bound friends — artists, actors, writers, and careerless people who once had other plans — into the damaged state of middle age. Downtown Manhattan is their center of gravity, but these characters have been scattered, before waking up to find themselves so much human debris in the wake of personal failures, betrayals, and AIDS. A literary descendant of Renata Adler’s Speedboat and a forerunner of recent autofiction, Do Everything in the Dark concludes on the weekend before 9/11, and demonstrates that American wreckage wasn’t something invented on that sunny Tuesday morning. —Christian Lorentzen

The Known World , by Edward P. Jones (August 14, 2003) This intimate portrait of the great national nightmare of slavery comes disguised in the britches and mourning dresses of an antebellum historical novel. It was widely praised upon publication for revealing an obscure chapter of American history — free people of color who owned slaves — but the history itself was largely invented. The Virginian county of Henry Townsend’s plantation, the reference citations, and many of the period details are made up. Having denied the consolations of historical distance, The Known World forces a reckoning with a moral horror that lives still. —Nathaniel Rich

The Plot Against America , by Philip Roth (September 30, 2004) It can be easy to forget that The Plot Against America , which today reads as a parable for Trump’s America, was widely received as an allegory for W.’s — an interpretation that Roth encouraged by insisting the opposite. The novel begins in a buzz of fear and the pitch increases steadily, unbearably. But it’s Roth’s doomed hero, Walter Winchell, whose speeches have the uncanny urgency of prophecy: “How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds by the fascist fifth column of the Republican right marching under the sign of the cross and the flag?” —Nathaniel Rich

DISSENT: The Human Stain (April 2000) This was the first Roth title that came to mind, which surprised me because I wouldn’t list it if the parameters were widened from “21st century” to “ever.” But it’s really a marvel of racial politics and suspense. And who doesn’t love Nathan Zuckerman? Don’t answer that. —Sloane Crosley

The Line of Beauty , by Alan Hollinghurst (October 1, 2004) Sometimes a book just feels monumental. The Line of Beauty follows a young gay man, Nick, who lives with the family of a Tory MP under Thatcher — who makes an unforgettable cameo appearance. This is the story of two initiations. It’s about a loss of innocence coinciding with social success, but also about a coming in of sorts: Nick’s entrance into London’s gay subculture. He is always seduced by beauty, but as AIDS looms — along with the threat of discovery by his conservative hosts — Nick can’t outrun the politics of his aesthetics or the contradictions in the social structures to which he clings. —Alice Bolin

Veronica , by Mary Gaitskill (October 11, 2005) Like her first novel, Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991), Gaitskill’s second revolves around a friendship between two women. Alison Owen, a former model living with hepatitis C, reflects on her complex closeness with Veronica Ross, a woman we learn died alone with AIDS. How we care for people in pain is at the heart of this moving, unsentimental look at our fragility, written with remarkable metaphorical and lyrical power. In a book not about living through hardships but about living in their aftermath, Gaitskill’s Alison is indelible, as is her memory of her lost friend. —Wyatt Mason

The Road , by Cormac McCarthy (September 26, 2006) Here is the author of Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men still trafficking in his primordial themes — good vs. evil — but locating it tenderly within the relationship between a father and son (as they journey through a post-Apocalyptic hellscape). The father knows he is dying and, in a world overrun by cannibalism and violence, he’s trying to teach his son how to tell the “good guys” from the bad. This is McCarthy at his most restrained, and consequently most resonant. There is no fiction subject more trendy (and more urgent) than the multifarious possible ends of the world; McCarthy led the way, and might be impossible to surpass. —Edward Hart

Ooga-Booga , by Frederick Seidel (November 14, 2006) “The title is Kill Poetry , / And in the book poetry kills.” The poems in Frederick Seidel’s 12th collection, Ooga Booga , don’t kill but they come awfully close. Some poets are easy to love; Seidel is so good you revere him despite yourself. Born in 1936 and still living in New York, he’s the heir to a family coal fortune, a famously dapper dresser, and a writer of odes to Ducati motorcycles. He also captures the absurd melancholy of modern existence in dark, crystalline stanzas. “The poet the 20th century deserved” is how one critic put it, and it’s not clear if that’s a compliment or not, or if it matters. At 82, he’s the poet the 21st century deserves, too, and still desperately needs. —Adam Sternbergh

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , by Junot Díaz (September 6, 2007) Junot Díaz’s first novel not only affirmed the vitality and the talent displayed in his first book, Drown , in a resounding way, it expanded the idea of what is possible, and what American literature could be. It could be written for an audience in ascendancy, told in vernacular but expertly formed and composed. It could concern the intensely personal, but telescope out to the historic and the political. The astounding Oscar Wao did all of that, leaving us with a lasting understanding of the American experience as encompassing lives beyond our blinkered borders. —Oscar Villalon

Wolf Hall , by Hilary Mantel (April 30, 2009) Any writer could have done the research that informs this remarkable historical novel. But only genius, gimlet-eyed, wicked Hilary Mantel could have created the animating intelligence at the heart of it: Thomas Cromwell, adviser to Henry VIII, antagonist to Thomas More, brilliant and ambitious, heartbroken and ruthless. “As some men have an eye for horseflesh or cattle to be fattened,” Mantel writes, “he has an eye for risk,” and as a novelist she shares this quality, taking unlikely narrative leaps that always pay off. No book this learned should be so wildly entertaining. —Dan Kois

The Possessed , by Elif Batuman (February 16, 2010) The best essay collections are about the writer’s strange and hungry mind groping around the contours of the world, but this one is also a hilarious book on a famously grave subject: Russian literature. Batuman creates a memoir of her time in Stanford’s PhD program obliquely, writing about authors first and herself second. She mimics the forms of fiction — a Sherlock Holmes–style detective story in “The Murder of Leo Tolstoy,” an old-school travelogue of studying abroad in Uzbekistan — to better comment on them. The Possessed and Batuman’s novel, The Idiot , together form a body of work that queries the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction — and between books and their readers. —Alice Bolin

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake , by Aimee Bender (June 1, 2010) All of Bender’s stories are written in a mode that is not quite fantasy, certainly not realist, and somewhat fairy-tale-ish (in other words a style that is all her own), offering beautiful, profound stories about, for instance, a six-inch-tall man who lives in a bird cage in his wife’s house; or, as in the title of another collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. It really doesn’t matter which of her books you pick up first; you’ll be immediately hooked and read them all. —Tom Lutz

Mr. Fox , by Helen Oyeyemi (June 1, 2011) Not since Angela Carter has a writer subverted classic fairy-tale tropes the way Helen Oyeyemi does, to transformative effect. Mr. Fox is perhaps the first brilliant work of romantic metafiction, a novel that tells the story of a few characters over and over again in pitch-perfect iterations that reveal volumes about love and loneliness and violence. Undeniably clever — but not so clever as to obscure the sentiment embedded in Oyeyemi’s shrewd structure — Mr. Fox has the brains and the heart to win over both those who enjoy unraveling how fiction works and those who just seek pure enjoyment. —Maris Kreizman

Lives Other Than My Own , by Emmanuel Carrère (September 13, 2011) The sui-generis French author of fiction, nonfiction, and works that bridge the two has published many excellent books, among them the true-crime account The Adversary (2000) and The Kingdom (2014). My favorite by a nose is Lives Other Than My Own , a book that defies tidy summary, but which, though preoccupied with the very saddest human experiences — the deaths of a young child and a sibling — is also believably a book about happiness, one which earns its happy ending. —Wyatt Mason

DISSENT: The Kingdom (August 29, 2014) I left the Catholic Church at 13 and have not spent much time thinking about religion since then. But this book kept me pinned to its pages until the end. It is personal and rigorous, skeptical and open, casual and profound, and its speculative portrait of Saint Luke is as compelling as any fictional life I’ve read lately. —Luc Sante

Zone One , by Colson Whitehead (October 6, 2011) In a century marked by the erosion of the high-low divide that once separated “literature” from genre fiction, Zone One is the exemplary hybrid, the paragon of what each mode offers the other. Whitehead’s post-apocalyptic experiment — a zombie novel that’s also a 9/11 meditation that’s also a cultural satire — delivers both moving psychological realism and satisfying gore. (The moment when hero Mark Spitz discovers his undead mother feasting on his dad’s corpse will stay with me until the day a zombie chows down on mine.) Whitehead has written terrific novels that more directly address the horrors of American history, but never one that more accurately portrays the horrors of the American present. —Dan Kois

DISSENT: Sag Harbor (April 28, 2009) This thoroughly uneventful but linguistically dazzling autobiographical account of an upper-middle-class black holiday enclave accomplishes what very few books attempt: to remove the contemporary black experience from the realm of extremes. Unlike the more zeitgeisty Underground Railroad , this is neither a lament about subjugation nor a tale of individual escape. It neither denies the persistence of racism nor revels in the lingering wound. In this book as in real life, anti-blackness is but a single facet of the black experience. It is genuinely fresh. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

Gone Girl , by Gillian Flynn (May 24, 2012) Six years, a film adaptation, and many, many imitators later, it can be difficult to recall why Flynn’s third thriller was such a genre game-changer. But I’ll never forget how loudly I gasped at the now-infamous mid-novel narrative twist, as audacious as Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (both of these play fair with the reader, by the way). Flynn’s writing, always Ginsu-sharp, leveled up here, especially on the stress of a marriage under strain in the wake of 2008’s economic collapse. We’re playing by Gone Girl rules now. —Sarah Weinman

NW , by Zadie Smith (August 27, 2012) Zadie Smith is maybe the most important British novelist of the 21st century (yeah, I said it). She unpacks layered cultural identities in the tradition of Dickens, Eliot, and Austen. If Smith was in E.M. Forster mode in the wonderful On Beauty , she went full Virginia Woolf in NW , her fourth and maybe her best novel, undertaking a Mrs . Dalloway– esque journey through London. NW is not only about the intersecting lives of characters who grew up together in a Northwest London housing project, but also leveraging the complexity of the modernist project to ask difficult questions about race and social status. —Alice Bolin

White Girls , by Hilton Als (January 1, 2013) En route to the airport, I ask one of my boyfriends to tell me, in his own words, why White Girls belongs here. As it happens, the boyfriend has, stored on his phone, favorite lines from the book. Here are some: “Other people are always our parents.” “I cannot bear to imagine unraveling my mother, her hair, her retribution.” “Nowadays, no one leaves the house without some kind of script.” “I’d like to fuck some truth into Suicide Bitch, if I could get it up.” “We hate white girls because we are white girls and that’s what white girls do.” —David Velasco

My Struggle: A Man in Love , by Karl Ove Knausgaard (May 13, 2013) What was it about this thoroughly Gen-X Norwegian man that caused so many readers to plunge into his struggle — an epic stretching over nearly 4,000 pages — as if it were their own? Was it the agony of his relationship with his alcoholic father? Was it the tribulations of parenthood, so many hours at kiddie parties and not the writing desk? Or was it the passion that seized him when he first met his future second wife and cut up his face when she rejected him? With its digressions within digressions, A Man in Love — book two of My Struggle — is the most formally thrilling in the series. In its pathetic way, it’s also the funniest. —Christian Lorentzen

The Goldfinch , by Donna Tartt (September 23, 2013) Tartt seems to have inhaled the complete works of Charles Dickens and magically exhaled them into a thoroughly original narrative that reinvents the old-fashioned social novel, while capturing our anxious post-9/11 age with uncommon fervor and precision. Like Great Expectations, it concerns the sentimental education of an orphan as well as a mysterious benefactor. The story takes young Theo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where a bomb kills his mother, to sojourns in Las Vegas and Amsterdam and dangerous encounters with drug dealers, mobsters, and other sinister types. In the hands of a lesser novelist, such developments might feel contrived, but Tartt writes with such authority and verve and understanding of character that her story becomes just as persuasive as it is suspenseful. —Michiko Kakutani

Dept. of Speculation , by Jenny Offill (January 28, 2014) If the novel exists to help readers reconcile themselves to the disappointments of adulthood, Dept. of Speculation ranks up there with Balzac’s Lost Illusions . Its narrator is a type relatively new in literature — a female writer who is also a mother. (The book is written in fragments, reflecting the temporality of motherhood and depression, that are alternately wry, bereft, tender, furious, despairing, and joyful.) Before having a baby, she had dreamed of being an “art monster.” But this book is proof that great art does not require a spouse who licks your stamps. It requires only what Offill possesses in abundance, and what her narrator knows is the highest wisdom: “attention.” —Christine Smallwood

All My Puny Sorrows , by Miriam Toews (April 11, 2014) There have been bigger, splashier novels featuring suicidal characters published in the 21st century, but none so resonant as Toews’s stunner — the story of two sisters, one of whom is kind of miserable while the other is accomplished, talented, and determined to kill herself. A profoundly tender love story about deep despair, Sorrows also brims with jokes that are real and plentiful and well-earned, as well as a keen sense of what joy looks like even in the darkest of times. —Maris Kreizman

Citizen: An American Lyric , by Claudia Rankine (October 7, 2014) Rankine’s compilation of lyric poems, micro-essays, snatches of cultural commentary, and startlingly direct descriptions of her everyday experiences as a black woman became the essential literary complement to Black Lives Matter and probably the most important work of American poetry in the 21st century. Fiercely eccentric, refusing any easy resolutions, Citizen ’s success represents a redefinition of the conventions of American literature. —Jess Row

consent not to be a single being , by Fred Moten (2017–2018) At a time when both theory and criticism are frequently and convincingly attacked as exhausted forms, Moten’s trilogy has reinvented both. Reading hip-hop and jazz musicians through and against philosophers and visual artists, he interrogates aesthetic, political, and social phenomena through analyses of blackness. He offers a profusion of arguments and deconstructions to create a coherence that nonetheless remains open to active reading and interpretation. In its mixture of theoretical complexity and disarming directness, Moten’s beautifully written trilogy offers the sheer pleasure of art. —Lidija Haas

The Rest of the (Premature, Debatable, Arbitrary, But Still Illuminating) Canon

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , by Michael Chabon (September 19, 2000) The star creation of the comic-book whiz kids Joe Kavalier and Sammy Klayman is the Escapist, a superhero cloaked in a midnight-blue costume emblazoned with a golden key. The Escapist lacks physical might, but like the novel, he possesses a shrewd intelligence, courage, and an insatiable appetite for adventure. As Clay puts it, the Escapist doesn’t just fight crime, “he frees the world of it. He frees people, see?” In this novel of Houdinis, femme fatales, and comic book villains (including Adolf Hitler) — a novel about the American genius for self-invention, in all its glorious and hideous manifestations — Michael Chabon proves that the strongest superpower of all is the ability to tell a great story. —Nathaniel Rich

The Amber Spyglass , by Philip Pullman (October 10, 2000) The concluding volume of Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy takes its teenaged heroes, Lyra and Will, across universes, up to heaven, and deep into the shadowlands of the dead. But intertwined with their epic tale is the quiet, odd story of physicist Mary Malone, one of the greatest of Pullman’s creations, who uses the rational tools of the scientist to untangle the trilogy’s cosmological mysteries. The Harry Potter series may have launched children’s books into the commercial stratosphere, but it was this book — a stew of Milton and Blake, rich with allusion, kind and fierce — that made clear the imaginative and literary heights to which books for young people could ascend. And the ending: Oh! The ending! My heart breaks again just thinking of it. —Dan Kois

True History of the Kelly Gang , by Peter Carey (January 9, 2001) There isn’t a novelist alive shy of Toni Morrison who can forge sprung poetry from the speech of mere mortals quite like Carey. In True History of the Kelly Gang , which won him a second Booker Prize in 2001, he conjured the clang and twang of Australia’s infamous bushranger, Ned Kelly, telling his life story from beyond the grave to a daughter he left behind. Here’s all the adventure of robbing banks to give to the poor, but also the shame and rage of a convict long gone turned into eternal narrative. An ecstatic and furious book. —John Freeman

The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos , by Anne Carson (February 6, 2001) Among the most immediate, most poignant, and funniest of Carson’s works, Beauty tells the story of a marriage to a vampiric, manipulative narcissist, and explores some of her favorite themes: frustration over what cannot be understood or communicated; power struggles enacted through language; erotic longing. The sharp, fragmentary collision of essay, poetry, fiction, and memoir is arguably becoming a dominant form in 21st-century literature so far, and Carson created a compelling template for it that won’t be easily surpassed. —Lidija Haas

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse , by Louise Erdrich (April 3, 2001) In our age of fake presidents and wished-for miracles, I’ve begun to long for a rediscovery of Erdrich’s novel. The book tells the tale of Father Damien, a woman who for 50 years disguises herself as a man so she can serve an Ojibwe congregation. Damien’s anguished, searching voice is the book’s oaken rudder, as she steers through currents of moral dilemma. Is a lie a sin if it preserves her work? Should she instigate against a false prophet, or dedicate herself to highlighting humans’ capacity for good? Perhaps the last question is eternal, but Erdrich makes it feel freshly so. —John Freeman

Austerlitz , by W.G. Sebald (October 2, 2001) Austerlitz bears all of Sebald’s hallmarks: a saturnine narrator, a love of archives and depositories, and a series of chance encounters with someone who has a story to tell. That someone, Jacques Austerlitz, was brought to England aboard a kindertransport as an infant, and he is in the process of recovering the truth about his parents — he first learns that his mother, an opera singer, was killed at Theresienstadt. The sweep of European cultural history is laid out like an enormous map in order to precisely locate the circumstances of the crime. The sentences are long, the paragraphs cyclopean, the pacing leisurely, and yet it’s all hypnotically gripping. —Luc Sante

Fingersmith , by Sarah Waters (February 4, 2002) You know a twist is coming. About ten million friends have hinted about the twist. “You haven’t read Fingersmith ?” they said. “Oh man, that twist.” But it doesn’t matter that you know the twist is coming because when it arrives in this page-turner about a shifty ladies’ maid and her neurotic, beautiful lady, you will still cackle with glee. I myself threw the book to the ground, shouting, “Holy shit!” You have never had a reading experience quite as propulsive and enjoyable as barreling through Sarah Waters’s sordid, sexy saga of swindlers and smut-peddlers screwing each other all across Victorian England. —Dan Kois

The Time of Our Singing , by Richard Powers (October 3, 2002) Powers revisits the civil rights struggles of the last century from an unexpected angle, illuminating some of the deepest rifts and tensions in American life via an often exhilarating meditation on time and music. The novel follows a German Jewish physicist; his African-American wife, whose ambitions as a singer are thwarted early; and their children, two of whom become classical musicians. Few writers have captured the experience of listening to music the way Powers does, and his evocations of historical events have the same vividness. The book’s scope and grandeur make clear that the realist novel can still embody ideas as few other forms can. —Lidija Haas

The Book of Salt , by Monique Truong (April 7, 2003) Based on a passing reference to a Vietnamese cook in The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, Truong’s first novel reimagines the domestic life of Gertrude Stein and Toklas through the eyes of Binh, whose rich and caustic voice makes him one of the great fictional narrators of the last quarter-century. It’s a miraculous paradox — a novel that lovingly reproduces the atmosphere of European modernism in order to reveal its racist and imperialist underpinnings. —Jess Row

Mortals , by Norman Rush (May 27, 2003) A novel of adultery and conspiracy, of Americans in Africa on the morning after the end of the Cold War, Mortals follows a CIA agent (and Milton scholar) in Botswana in 1992. Rush is the most politically committed and engaged of contemporary American novelists, and Mortals is the most sustained and well-informed fictional account of U.S. meddling in countries that rarely feature in our headlines. The human story of a faltering marriage merges with the geopolitical in the form of a boiling civil conflict. Rush is Joseph Conrad’s heir in the era of globalization. —Christian Lorentzen

Home Land , by Sam Lipsyte (February 16, 2004) What would a Gen-X Notes from Underground look like? In Lipsyte’s version, it comes in the form of letters written to a high-school alumni newspaper, confessing to the nightmare of the American meritocracy: “I did not pan out.” Lipsyte’s Underground Man has a name and a nickname, both of which mark him as pathetic. Lewis “Teabag” Miner is the embodiment of the loser under late capitalism. Location: New Jersey, a place just across the river from the precincts of power, but in fact a wasteland of strip malls, fast food, dive bars, and work-from-home content-generation jobs. Teabag has graduated into a world of bullshit, and what he has to tell his high-school classmates is that they were living in a land of bullshit all along. —Christian Lorentzen

Oblivion , by David Foster Wallace (June 8, 2004) Oblivion was the final book of fiction Wallace published before his life was cut short by suicide. Although a great writer of nonfiction, Wallace’s idea of fiction was of another order of magnitude. As Oblivion showcases, one of the things that made Wallace so necessary was his insistence on formal inventiveness: None of the eight stories in Oblivion resembles any other, each a kind of experiment that never has the whiff of the lab. Rather, these stories attempt to find new ways of getting at the deep, dark difficulty of being a modern human, a predicament so funny it could make you weep, as these stories themselves are likely to make you do: in rage, in sorrow, in gratitude. —Wyatt Mason

Honored Guest , by Joy Williams (October 5, 2004) Joy Williams is one of the contemporary masters of the American short story, and her 2004 collection Honored Guest finds her at her most bizarre and profound. It is easy to be wrapped up in Williams’s sentences, in lines of dialogue like, “‘I’m Priscilla Dickman and I’m an ex-agoraphobic. Can I buy you a drink?’” But Honored Guest is much more than its delightful surface. These are stories of lonely characters on the rim of tragedy — a girl living with her terminally ill mother, a woman whose boyfriend is gravely injured in a hunting accident — probing the eternal with hilarious detachment and moving, sorrowful confusion. —Alice Bolin

Suite Française , by Irène Némirovsky (October 31, 2004) Enough time has passed that the astounding story of this posthumous, unfinished novel — which Némirovsky wrote in secret in Nazi-occupied France and was discovered by her daughters six decades after she was killed at Auschwitz — can cede center stage to the book itself. And what a marvel Suite Française is, an incisive, heartbreaking portrait of a small French town under seige, and the people trying to survive, even to live, as Hitler’s horrors march closer and closer to their doors. Even incomplete, it’s a masterpiece of observation and character study, a standout of Holocaust literature. —Sarah Weinman

The Sluts , by Dennis Cooper (January 13, 2005) Once upon a time, in the prelude to the plague years, gay male desire invented its most mesmeric and unbearable object: the twink. Blond, white, underweight, and user-friendly, he was a plastic icon of inverted, Aryan masculinity. As AIDS destroyed a population, as the internet quickened and anarchized our pornographies, the twink took off. Dennis Cooper hit this crepuscular intersection of web and death with effortless genius. A series of online rent-boy reviews describe the discovery, torture, and maybe murder of a barely-legal, no-limits hustler named Brad. Call it the twink cri de coeur — all surface, and so, perversely impenetrable. It is a dangerous fantasia, slipping so easily into the mouths and minds of homophobes. But go ahead, let them taste it. They want it as much as anyone. —David Velasco

Voices From Chernobyl , by Svetlana Alexievich (June 28, 2005) The Belarusian Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in 2015, ostensibly trades in oral history. Her books do not, however, bear much resemblance to the form as it is usually practiced. Here the accounts of witnesses and victims are orchestrated, arranged in counterpoint and as fugues and descants, with purposeful ellipses and repetitions, and edited to make every voice sound like a poet. Alexievich is clear about the extent to which she reshapes her material, and her books are only nominally about facts — they are concerned with impressions and feelings, and they remain in your ear long after you’ve turned the last page. —Luc Sante

Magic for Beginners , by Kelly Link (July 1, 2005) Any collection of Kelly Link’s stories will do. They shimmer in the borderlands of myth, genre, and literature. A convenience store caters to the mild-mannered zombies who emerge from a nearby gorge and clumsily attempt to shop. A group of teenagers bond over an elusive TV series. A suburban family becomes slowly and methodically alienated from every possession they own. Link’s stories can make you shudder, then laugh, then feel like a god has just walked past your window. —Laura Miller

The Afterlife , by Donald Antrim (May 30, 2006) A book of fierce love and heartbreaking shame, Antrim’s memoir of his mother, written in the wake of her death from lung cancer, was a radical departure from his wild comic novels of the 1990s. It was also an artistic breakthrough. Antrim’s mother was an alcoholic. Her marriage to his father, an English professor who left her for another woman and returned years later, was happy in neither of its incarnations. The emotions in this book are raw, the writing exquisite, and the family pain shattering. —Christian Lorentzen

Winter’s Bone , by Daniel Woodrell (August 7, 2006) Can a film adaptation be too good? I worry that Jennifer Lawrence’s breakout performance in the 2010 film has overshadowed this outstanding novel, which features what one critic called “the character of a lifetime.” The story of 16-year-old Ree Dolly trying to save her Ozark family is at once intimate and mythic. Woodrell’s language has a spiky beauty, he also uses localisms carefully. His depictions of violence are first-rate, vivid, and essential to the story. Oh, and it’s a glancing look at the methamphetamine scourge, largely forgotten but far from gone as the country now focuses on opioids. —Laura Lippman

Wizard of the Crow , by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (August 8, 2006) Thiong’o, often talked about as a Nobel Prize contender, was among the first celebrated post-independence African writers, along with Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. Imprisoned and then exiled from Kenya, he has been writing his memoirs and is now on his fourth volume. Wizard of the Crow , a fantastic (in all senses of the word) novel written in his native Kikuyu, is his masterpiece, published when he was 68. No novel has ever so profoundly mixed oral tradition, novelistic gamesmanship, serious political critique, literary meta-analysis, and every genre under the sun, from farce to tragedy. —Tom Lutz

American Genius, A Comedy , by Lynne Tillman (September 25, 2006) A modernist adventure for a new century: You spend the novel roaming around inside the mind of a woman who has taken refuge in a Magic Mountain–style sanatorium-cum–artists’ colony. Her compulsive digressions and recurring preoccupations mostly take the place of a conventional plot, and Tillman’s beautifully constructed sentences create their own propulsion, able to take a reader in any direction at any moment. From the opening pages, a singular consciousness emerges, both porous and radically isolated, and by stripping out most other elements, the book confirms the ultimate primacy of literary voice, of which this is a rare triumph. —Lidija Haas

Eat the Document , by Dana Spiotta (November 28, 2006) If Don DeLillo is a sage of 20th-century American politics and popular culture, Dana Spiotta is the author who has carried the torch into the 21st. Her prose is as catchy and melodic as the music she describes in so many of her novels with the insight of a rock critic, and her fiction often illuminates the way we distort our memories. Eat the Document is the story of a woman who goes underground in the 1970s after participating in violence with a radical group, and her son who uncovers her past in the 1990s, when the ideals of the leftist movement have been romanticized and perverted. —Maris Kreizman

The Harry Potter novels, by J.K. Rowling (1997–2007) With her seven Harry Potter novels, J.K. Rowling has created a fictional world as fully imagined as Oz or Narnia or Middle Earth. Each volume grows progressively darker, and as more responsibilities are heaped on Harry’s shoulders, the Boy Who Lived becomes the leader of the Resistance. Grounding his story in the mundane Muggle world, with its ordinary frustrations and challenges, even as she conjures a wildly inventive magical realm, Rowling has crafted an epic that transcends its classical sources as effortlessly as it leapfrogs conventional genres. In doing so, she created a series of books that have captivated both children and adults — novels that hold a mirror to our own mortal world as it lurches into the uncertainties of the 21st century. —Michiko Kakutani

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City , by August Kleinzahler (April 1, 2008) August Kleinzahler is such a good poet, such a master of English vernaculars and a variety of modernisms, with such a gift for observational detail, that I think he gets overlooked or underpraised, partly for his consistency. Sleeping It Off in Rapid City is one of the great collections of American poetry, from the opening title poem, which exudes the bleak vastness and kitsch of midwestern landscapes, to the various blues lyrics and seemingly offhand evocations of San Francisco weather, as classical as the Tang Dynasty greats they recall. —Nikil Saval

The White Tiger , by Aravind Adiga (April 22, 2008) The White Tiger promised “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man,” launching a relentless attack on the myth of a “new” capitalism, and not just in India. Adiga’s comic monologue and many-voiced testament follows Balram Halwai, naïve servant and caged spirit, to the climactic “act of entrepreneurship”: braining his master with an empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black in Delhi, then stealing his bag of politicians’ bribes to conquer the tech world of Bangalore. Spiritually the equal of Wright’s Native Son and Balzac’s Père Goriot , this Booker Prize–winning debut was how a major writer announced himself — in fury. —Mark Greif

The Lazarus Project , by Aleksandar Hemon (May 1, 2008) A fictional Bosnian writer (and Hemon doppelgänger of sorts) travels to Eastern Europe to retrace the footsteps of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant who survived a pogrom only to be gunned down in the home of Chicago’s police chief in 1908, while in alternating chapters Averbuch’s story unspools. Hemon transmogrifies the smallest details into strangely vivid prose: Gunsmoke moves slowly “like a school of fish” while a character hears “straw crepitating” in her pillow. Hemon’s verbal effects accumulate into a haunting portrait of immigrant life. Hemon is Nabokov’s heir, in a more perilous time for American newcomers. —Edward Hart

Home , by Marilynne Robinson (September 2, 2008) Grace suffuses this novel, and not just its prose. Twenty-four years after her debut, the magnificent Housekeeping , Robinson returned to fiction with Gilead , winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. But its sequel, Home , is the more sublime realization of her vasts gifts, the masterpiece of what’s so far a trilogy (Robinson’s Lila appeared in 2014). A retelling of the prodigal-son parable set in 1950s Iowa, Home is also something rare in American literature these days: a meditation on Christian transfiguration. It derives its power from family pain and the radical nature of forgiveness. —Christian Lorentzen

DISSENT: Gilead (November 4, 2004) Marilynne Robinson’s writing through the lens of religious faith can make even the most unspiritual reader feel blessed. Yes, both Home and Gilead are set within the same time and place, but I’m loyal to the latter because it came out first — and the first discovery of grace is the most thrilling. —Maris Kreizman

Fine Just the Way It Is , by Annie Proulx (September 9, 2008) The short story is often offered the kiddie table when seated beside the novel. Annie Proulx the novelist is and will remain one of America’s greatest, but here she elevates story to a category that tips over the word fiction . Proulx’s Wyoming is a brutal, raw life and landscape, characters battered and isolated; and she is so unafraid of the dark that these stories become like religious parables not just of a region or nation, but of existence. Add to that her pitch-black humor — she got the chuckles writing these gigantic stories. —Dagoberto Gilb

Scenes From a Provincial Life: Boyhood, Youth, and Summertime , by J.M. Coetzee (1997–2009) In this autobiographical trilogy, Coetzee forged a clinical way of writing about the self and raised the meta stakes. Are these memoirs or novels? (The last one kills off the author, among other departures from the facts.) Boyhood presents a detached account of growing up an English-speaking Afrikaner in apartheid South Africa, a sickly boy with imaginings of greatness and a mounting sense of shame about his cruel society. Youth moves to London, where Coetzee worked as a programmer for IBM, and plumbs the anguish of the aspiring, exiled poet. The form is broken in Summertime , which combines diary fragments and a fictional biographer’s interviews of the dead writer’s acquaintances. The self-portrait that emerges from these (very funny) books is pitiless and unforgettable. —Christian Lorentzen

Notes From No Man’s Land , by Eula Biss (February 3, 2009) Biss’s insanely good collection has been instrumental in fostering a new generation of essayists. She writes poignantly on racism, gentrification, home, and identity, probing the proximity of white and black in America. She also forges new styles for the personal essay, braiding literary quotations, academic research, ironic anecdotes, and scenes from her own life to construct arguments that are complex and profound. The medium is the message here: The title essay connects Laura Ingalls Wilder, a gentrifying Chicago neighborhood, and swimming in Lake Michigan to understand the American fixation on — and fear of — borders and frontiers. —Alice Bolin

Spreadeagle , by Kevin Killian (March 1, 2010) Killian is a poet as well as perhaps the most experienced society novelist of the gay demimonde since John Rechy, but Spreadeagle is like Rechy meets Robert Walser. It’s both comically droll and ardently, deeply noir. The plot feels kind of British fin de siècle — a menage involving a confused young art student and an older couple, one an activist and the other a gay pulp-novelist, all of whom collide with a pair of pornographers and drug dealers, the entirety taking place under the shadow of AIDS. It’s a quintessentially California novel as well as simply an occasion for Killian’s flawless poet’s ear to roll out for us pages of the most memorably dank, swift, and knowing gay dialogue I’ve ever read. —Eileen Myles

Super Sad True Love Story , by Gary Shteyngart (July 27, 2010) Gary Shteyngart’s best novel (so far) virtually invented its own literary category — near-dystopian satire — and it has indeed proved shockingly accurate. It’s set in a future New York where the dollar is pegged to the Chinese yuan, inequality has transformed Central Park into a protest camp, and phone apps display your potential date’s credit score. But the real key to the novel is the hopeless relationship between its protagonists, Lenny Abramov and Eunice Park, whose relatively small age gap — Lenny is in his late 30s, Eunice her mid-20s — measures the difference between the last generation to grow up before the internet and the first generation to grow up saturated in it. —Jess Row

Seven Years , by Peter Stamm (March 22, 2011) Whatever it is that flattens so much American MFA fiction is blissfully missing from this Swiss novelist’s haunting European realism. Seven Years employs strong and supple sentences evocative of Camus to tell the all-too-recognizable story of a successful man, Alex, who ought to be happily married to his beautiful and accomplished wife, Sonia, but is silently exploding. Through Stamm’s deft strokes of observation and insight, the bizarre affair Alex pursues with a woman who physically repulses him somehow seems not only plausible but revelatory — shedding light on the extent to which we can never really figure out another person or even, maybe, ourselves. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Sense of an Ending , by Julian Barnes (August 4, 2011) This is an elegant, deceptively simple little novel, a quietly devastating, deftly plotted moral mystery that hinges on the unreliable juncture of memory, time, and history, with aging and remorse thrown in. Its title invites dual interpretations — the feeling that something has ended, and making sense of an ending. The story centers on a retired divorcé for whom an unexpected bequest leads to a reassessment of his memories and a painful recognition of how much he’d gotten wrong. “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” —Heller McAlpin

1Q84 , by Haruki Murakami (October 25, 2011) Murakami’s magnum opus (though probably not his very best novel — I would still vote for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle ) brings together a haunting love story with the sinister manipulations of a personality cult not unlike Aum Shinrikyo. Like many writers of his generation, Murakami is preoccupied with the aftereffects of the 1960s, and though on the surface 1Q84 appears concerned with the mundane lives of disappointed and awkward lovers, the novel represents something like a Grand Unified Theory of Japanese life over four decades. —Jess Row

The Gentrification of the Mind , by Sarah Schulman (January 7, 2012) Sarah Schulman is a first-class thinker who upholds our duty to preserve the marginal, the complicated history. This memoir maps out how the razing, via AIDS, of queer, diverse communities in New York and San Francisco paved the way for “urban transformations” that in fact led to suburbanized experiences and cramped intellectual lives. She protests sophistry and demonstrates the saneness of radical notions. When she points out that “very few children actually grow up to make the world a better place,” you may feel not only doubtful about reproducing, but also sorry you yourself were born. It’s unforgettable — which is the point. —Sarah Nicole Prickett

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , by Ben Fountain (May 1, 2012) No novel better captures the first decade of this century in a certain sector of America — pro-Bush, pro–Iraq War, pro–free-market capitalism, and steeped in evangelical Christianity and Fox News — than Fountain’s satire of heartland jingoism and the one-percenter cynicism that exploits it. It’s seen through the eyes of a young but increasingly disillusioned soldier being honored for heroism in a football stadium extravaganza. Both savagely funny and heartbreaking, Billy Lynn scrutinizes a facet of the American character that has since slid into an unsatirizable sump of excess, but like all great novelists, Fountain was able to locate the humanity in it all the same. —Laura Miller

Capital , by John Lanchester (June 11, 2012) In a world where people write porny fan-fiction about the Property Brothers — no, seriously, they do — why aren’t there more great novels about real estate? Capital has a simple set-up, telling the interconnected stories of a single block in South London in 2008, where house prices are going up, up, up, and residents find themselves receiving mysterious postcards stating, “We Want What You Have.” Lanchester employs a bird’s-eye view that sweeps in for dazzling close-ups, then swoops out again, until you see not only the entirety of Pepys Road, but the city, the world — and the economy that’s crumbling under the weight of everyone’s aspirations. —Laura Lippman

The MaddAddam Trilogy ( Oryx and Crake , The Year of the Flood , and MaddAddam ), by Margaret Atwood (2003-2013) “Speculations about what the world would be like after human control of it ended had been — long ago, briefly — a queasy form of popular entertainment.” Queasy, yes, but exhilarating too. The human beings and humanoids of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy lose control of the natural world, then of themselves, in a bloody wonderland of mutant raccoons, endangered-species luxury couture, and ethereal beings with genitalia that turns blue at times of sexual arousal. But Atwood herself never loses control. The trilogy is the rare work of literature in which dread and joy exist in equal — and extreme — measure. —Nathaniel Rich

DISSENT: The Blind Assassin (September 2, 2000) She may be the queen of dystopia, but I have always been drawn to Atwood’s more realistic storytelling. In this novel, we get a little of both. It’s the literary equivalent of a Russian nesting doll, with layers of detective noir, sci-fi, and romance opening up to reveal the tiniest doll and the ultimate mystery — one of the heart. —Maris Kreizman

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , by Anthony Marra (May 7, 2013) This extraordinary debut novel set in war-torn Chechnya is a feat of empathetic imagination. It makes a compelling case for what literature — and so-called cultural appropriation — can do to transcend our personal experience and reduce the blind spots in our lives. Tolstoyan in its ambition, breadth, and deep humanity, Marra’s portrait of a nation devastated by war — and of a terrified man who risks his life to save a young girl — is harrowing and heartrending, but also brightened by humor and transcendent hopefulness. Taking its title from a medical dictionary’s definition of life, the novel is a constellation of six interwoven points of view — all vital and phenomenally moving. —Heller McAlpin

Taipei , by Tao Lin (June 4, 2013) Lin came to fame as a blogger and poet with a notoriously blank style. His was the language of the digital native, and when he started writing novels, his detractors saw his attempts to turn the vernacular of the internet into literature as a sort of fraud. With Taipei , his fifth work of fiction, his style evolved into something undeniably sophisticated and often beautiful; he translated the consciousness of a life lived largely online into a new way of describing the world IRL, as mediated by an almost relentless (and relentlessly quantified) intake of pills and powders. One of the book’s central repeated images is a crucial image for our times: the narrator lying on his back and dropping his phone on his own face. —Christian Lorentzen

Men We Reaped , by Jesmyn Ward (September 17, 2013) Yes, I rate Jesmyn Ward’s 2013 memoir above her two novels, Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing , that won National Book Awards. It’s that good, that important. Well into its third century, the United States has yet to reckon with the death rate of young African-American men, an epidemic hiding in plain sight. Ward, who lost five family members and friends in a four-year span, harnesses her incandescent prose to make a deeply personal story universal. Part of the book’s genius is its nonlinear structure; her peripatetic journey amplifies the doggedness of grief and rage. —Laura Lippman

Family Life , by Akhil Sharma (April 7, 2014) Shortly after the Mishra family emigrates from Delhi to Queens, their older son dives into a swimming pool and becomes brain dead. The narrator is a young child when the accident occurs, and must navigate the embarrassments of being a recent immigrant as well as the grief that deforms his family. Sharma possesses a rare understanding of psychology and an unsentimental, bleakly comic sensibility. (“You’re sad?” the father says. “I want to hang myself every day.”) Every detail has been burnished and floats precipitously over depths of feeling, while the plot zooms ahead. The point is not to wring meaning out of suffering — Sharma never does — but to bear witness to it. —Christine Smallwood

How to Be Both , by Ali Smith (August 28, 2014) Scottish writer Ali Smith’s furious yet-to-be-completed seasonal quartet may turn out to be her crowning achievement, but its predecessor, How to Be Both , stands out for its ingeniousness and heart. There’s more than meets the eye in this structurally innovative, two-part novel that encompasses a mother-daughter relationship truncated by unexpected death, a gender-bending Renaissance artist, and a moving exploration of time, mortality, and the consolations of unconventional love, friendship, and art. Smith’s literary double-take models how to be both complex and inviting, linguistically playful and dead serious, mournful and joyous, brainy and tender. —Heller McAlpin

A Brief History of Seven Killings , by Marlon James (October 2, 2014) A Brief History is a sweltering chorus of voices, all constellating around the Jamaican musician Bob Marley and an attempt to assassinate him in 1976. James is a brilliant ventriloquist, whether speaking through an angry young woman, a feckless gangster, or a jaded American spy. Like Père Goriot and Our Mutual Friend , this is one of the great city novels, even if not all of it is set in Kingston. It makes the city rise in the reader’s imagination like a leviathan conjured out of talent, desperation, desire, grief, and an unstoppable life force. —Laura Miller

Preparation for the Next Life , by Atticus Lish (November 11, 2014) America’s brutal wars and the inhumanity of its immigration policies come together in this novel, but its real achievement is a transformative vision of New York City. Seen through the eyes of an immigrant from Western China and a traumatized American veteran, the city, especially Queens, comes to seem less the glistening metropolis of the Bloomberg imaginary than a brick-and-mortar wasteland constantly encroached by dust and weeds but possessed of its own strange beauty. It’s a beauty these two still perceive in the face of poverty, hunger, violence, and fear of incarceration because theirs is also a love story. And that may be the most radical thing about Lish’s magnificent novel. —Christian Lorentzen

The Sympathizer , by Viet Thanh Nguyen (April 7, 2015) Viet Thanh Nguyen’s recent first novel comes after a career as a leading scholar of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian culture. It is part thriller, part the “Empire Writing Back,” part revenge tragedy, part screed against Apocalypse Now , and the best novel about the Vietnamese diaspora. The form — a series of confessions forced on the narrator by his shadowy prison warden — turns his stories from self-revelation to more complex utterances, adding a level of second-guessing for readers. An exquisite examination of the psyche under duress. —Tom Lutz

The Light of the World , by Elizabeth Alexander (April 21, 2015) After her husband, Ficre Ghebreyesus, dies unexpectedly just days after turning 50, poet and essayist Alexander writes, “Now, I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving it, and I saw the body with the soul gone.” In this exquisite account of marriage and widowhood, written with the magical simplicity of a fairy tale, Alexander meditates on her husband’s life as a refugee, an immigrant, an artist, an African man, a father, a son, a husband. —Kate Tuttle

The Broken Earth trilogy, by N.K. Jemisin (2015-2017) Jemisin, the first black writer to win sci-fi’s prestigious Hugo Award for best novel, made history again last month, becoming the first author ever to win the prize for each book in a trilogy. Her Broken Earth series, about a warring mother and daughter who each possess the power to incite, or quell, a world-destroying earthquake, is about institutional racism, climate change, and the terrible things the powerful will do to stay powerful. If that sounds a little too close to home, take heart: You’ve never been anywhere quite like the Stillness, a continent scattered with floating crystal obelisks and people who eat stone. Beautifully written, with epic magical battles and earthquakes, these books are literally groundbreaking. —Lila Shapiro

What Belongs to You , by Garth Greenwell (January 19, 2016) One of the most exquisite prose performances of the past decade, Greenwell’s first novel partakes in autofiction and the novel of trauma, and his writing about sex eschews the transgressive in favor of an elegiac mode. An American teacher of high school English in Sofia, Bulgaria, narrates a passionate affair with a young man he met in a public toilet. A phone call informs him that, back in Kentucky, his estranged father is dying, prompting a dreamlike series of memories that return him to the awakening of his sexuality in the homophobic heartland. Greenwell is a poet, and his sinuous sentences seem to come from another time. Since it can’t be the past, it must be the future. —Christian Lorentzen

Collected Essays & Memoirs (Library of America edition), by Albert Murray (October 18, 2016) Murray — renaissance man, blues philosopher, resolute non-victim — was almost criminally overlooked in the previous century. Perhaps this was because he was constitutionally incapable of suffering fools of any complexion and insisted on pointing out the most elemental truths: “The United States is in actuality not a nation of black people and white people. It is a nation of multicolored people,” Murray notes in his masterpiece, The Omni-Americans . We are in desperate need of such lucidity. If the arc of the intellectual universe also bends towards justice, then the Library of America’s canonization will resituate Murray alongside contemporaries James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. —Thomas Chatterton Williams

The Needle’s Eye , by Fanny Howe (November 1, 2016) Fanny Howe is a poet, a novelist, a memoirist, and one of America’s deepest, most whimsical and emotionally grounded writers. Here she takes the energy of a song like Nat King Cole’s “Nature Boy” (“There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy …”) and guides us into a meditation on youth and its proclivity to wander and find itself. Moving on that tack, she animates the story of the Boston bombers, two Kyrgyz -Americans whose fraught road to self-knowledge took a turn that killed three people and seriously maimed more than a dozen. It’s a tiny masterpiece, this book, and a gloriously weird read. —Eileen Myles

Ghachar Ghochar , by Vivek Shanbhag (February 7, 2017) Written with an economy of means — on just over 100 pages — that puts most nation-spanning epics to shame, Ghachar Ghochar conjures a South Indian family transformed by money in a narrative voice at once inimitable, funny, and filled with dread. The level of effortless glancing detail with which it draws minor characters — like a waiter in a Bangalore coffee house who acts as everyone’s therapist — is extraordinary. That it is one of the few novels translated (beautifully) from Kannada, a language spoken by millions and with its own literary tradition, to be published in the United States says a lot about our literary world’s myopia when it comes to the Indian novel. —Nikil Saval

The Hate U Give , by Angie Thomas (February 28, 2017) No crossover novel has proven the vitality of YA fiction as an art form more than Angie Thomas’s debut about one teenage girl’s entry into the Black Lives Matter movement. Taking its name from a Tupac Shakur acronym about the ills of systemic racism, The Hate U Give , or, THUG , explores the consequences of police violence against young men of color with more nuance, charm, and levity than you might imagine possible . THUG doesn’t offer easy answers, nor does it portray any of its diverse cast in binary terms, and the fact that it’s been banned in areas of the U.S. just shows how much it has hit a nerve. —Maris Kreizman

All Grown Up , by Jami Attenberg (March 7, 2017) One of the toughest bars to clear in fiction is the novel of connected stories, beautiful parts that add up to a gorgeous whole — and Jami Attenberg soared over it with her sixth book. The protagonist, Andrea, is a person who happens to be a woman who happens to be single who happens to live in Brooklyn. “Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me?” Andrea asks her therapist, who instructs her to list the other things she is. “In my head I think: I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh. To my therapist I say, ‘I’m a brunette.’” It’s the kind of novel I keep handy, like a pocket flask, taking little nips to get me through the day. —Laura Lippman

The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir , by Thi Bui (March 7, 2017) “How much of ME is my own and how much is stamped into my blood and bone, predestined?” Posed at the end of Thi Bui’s graphic memoir, this is the persistent, yearning question underlying this quietly heartbreaking book. Thi Bui chronicles her family’s journey from Vietnam to America, as well as her own transformation from daughter to mother. Stunningly self-assured, this is epic, intimate history rendered in understated words and images. —Kate Tuttle

Tell Me How it Ends , by Valeria Luiselli (March 13, 2017) This extraordinary little book is a powerful glimpse of how we extract stories in exchange for safety and belonging in America today. As a volunteer interpreter for migrant children fleeing poverty and violence, Luiselli describes 6- and 7-year-olds asked to perform and interpret their pain for an immigration system that sees a hard border—a border where, for most of Luiselli’s clients, the troubles have just begun. Cycling between her own life in the U.S. as a semi-documented American and mother, the lives of children she helps, and the questionnaire, Luiselli has woven an essential moral text for an age of migration. —John Freeman

Priestdaddy , by Patricia Lockwood (May 2, 2017) This poet’s memoir is the story of Lockwood’s adult return home when her husband temporarily loses his sight and the couple can no longer pay the rent. They are hipsters exiled to the heartland. Lockwood’s father is a clergyman and a conservative, but the resemblance to his bohemian poet daughter is unmistakable. The family dog is named Whimsy. Priestdaddy is the funniest book yet written about millennial–boomer culture clash. It is also moving in its accounts of Lockwood’s loss of faith, her teenage suicide attempt, and the pain that came with giving up her first love — singing — and then rediscovering herself as a writer. —Christian Lorentzen

Red Clocks , by Leni Zumas (January 16, 2018) This book follows a handful of female narrators in the Northwest in a future only slightly pushed from now (except for one, a polar explorer who is the biographical subject of one of the narrators) and, in prose that tingles with life and perversity and research and attitude and authenticity, brings them all to life. It’s political speculative fiction in an America where women have lost rights over their bodies and go to Canada to get abortions, crossing what’s come to be known as “the Pink Wall.” It’s brilliant stuff, and the woods surrounding the witchy herbalist character are both glittering and informed. To read this is to feel Leni Zumas knows everything. —Eileen Myles

The Largesse of the Sea Maiden , by Denis Johnson (January 16, 2018) Once upon a time a hard-living man, Johnson didn’t survive to see the publication of his final collection of stories, but it’s the near equal and spiritual cousin of his immortal Jesus’ Son . These stories flash through unforgettable images (notably a woman leaning in to kiss an amputee veteran’s stump) of men and women wounded by their own wildness. The beauty in Johnson’s stories is the beauty of the broken wing. Elvis and 9/11, junk and jail, hangovers and halfway houses — Johnson was a searcher in a lowlife America that’s largely vanished from our literature. —Christian Lorentzen

Asymmetry , by Lisa Halliday (February 6, 2018) On one hand, it would be unfair to consider Asymmetry only through the lens of Philip Roth. Lisa Halliday’s debut novel is bracing and brilliant entirely on its own terms, engrossing as a coming-of-age story and astute in exploring the project of fiction. On the other hand, not to consider it also through the lens of Philip Roth — who was once involved with Halliday and maps readily onto the novel’s Ezra Blazer — is to ignore a clue to what makes Asymmetry so exhilarating. Halliday considers the 20th-century canon from an intimate vantage: She sees not some abstract patriarchy but the patriarchs themselves, with their bypass scars and their tired pick-up lines. She demonstrates that power is never as simple as the familiar binaries of “privilege” might lead you to believe, at least not when it comes to art. —Molly Fischer

Contributors

Alice Bolin , essayist Sloane Crosley , author, most recently of Look Alive Out There Molly Fischer , senior editor, the Cut John Freeman , author, editor of Freeman’s Dagoberto Gilb , author of several short-story collections Mark Greif , author, Against Everything Lidija Haas , New Books columnist, Harper’s Edward Hart , senior editor, New York Michiko Kakutani , former chief book critic, the New York Times Hillary Kelly , critic and essayist Dan Kois , editor of the Slate Book Review Maris Kreizman , book critic and essayist Laura Lippman , crime novelist Christian Lorentzen , book critic, New York Tom Lutz , editor-in-chief, Los Angeles Review of Books Wyatt Mason , contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine Heller McAlpin , book reviewer for the Washington Post , NPR, and others Laura Miller , books and culture columnist, Slate Eileen Myles , poet Sarah Nicole Prickett , critic for Artforum , Bookforum , et al. Nathaniel Rich , author, most recently, of King Zeno Jess Row , novelist and critic Luc Sante , critic and author of Low Life Nikil Saval , co-editor, n+1 Lila Shapiro , culture journalist Christine Smallwood , critic and writer Adam Sternbergh , contributing editor, New York Kate Tuttle , president, National Book Critics Circle David Velasco , editor-in-chief, Artforum Oscar Villalon , editor and critic Sarah Weinman , author, The Real Lolita Thomas Chatterton Williams , contributing writer, The New York Times Magazine

Every editorial product is independently selected. If you buy an item through our links, Vulture may earn an affiliate commission.

*A version of this article appears in the September 17, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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21st Century Literary Genres: A Guide to Evolving Forms of Storytelling

The 21st century has witnessed a fascinating explosion in literary expression. While traditional genres like novels, poetry, and drama remain strong, the digital age has welcomed in exciting new forms and breathed fresh life into existing ones. This blog post will explore the vibrant landscape of 21st century literary genres to help you navigate the diverse offerings available to readers today. We’ll also compare and contrast the various 21st century literary genres.

What are the Different 21st Century Literary Genres?

The 21st century has seen a blurring of lines between established genres and the emergence of entirely new ones. Here’s a glimpse into some of the most captivating:

1. Digital Fiction (Digi-Fiction)

Digital fiction, also called electronic literature, is a story told through a digital platform. Unlike traditional novels you hold in your hand, digi-fiction takes advantage of the computer screen and its bells and whistles to tell a story.

Here’s how it differs from traditional fiction:

Interactive elements

Unlike traditional fiction, which involves flipping pages, Digi-fiction lets you choose the narrative path, click on hyperlinks that reveal hidden content, or even play mini-games within the story.

Multimedia experience

Digi-fiction lets you engage in a story that blends text with images, animations, sound effects, or even music to create an immersive experience.

Born digital

While you can find ebooks online, digi-fiction is different. It’s designed specifically for the digital format, and its impact might be lost if it was just printed out.

Here are some examples of digital fiction:

• Hypertext fiction:  Imagine a story where clicking on underlined words takes you down different narrative branches.
• Apps with branching storylines:  Some choose-your-own-adventure style games might be considered digital fiction.
• Websites with interactive elements:  A story that unfolds through a series of webpages with puzzles or hidden clues.

Some popular examples of digi-fiction include “Frankenstein” by David Morris , “Flight Paths” by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph , “Letter to an Unknown Soldier” by Kate Pullinger, and “For Rent: Haunted House” by Gavin Inglis , among many others.

2. Flash Fiction

Flash fiction is the opposite of digi-fiction in terms of length, but they both play with form in interesting ways.

Here’s how flash fiction differs from traditional fiction:

Flash fiction is a super short story, typically ranging from a few words up to 1,500 words. They can be as short as six words! Below are some examples:

• An empty chair and birthday cake for one.  This story leaves you wondering about the person and their situation. Maybe they’re lonely, or maybe they prefer solitude.
• Last page, happy ending, tears fall.  This story makes you question the character’s interpretation of the ending. Is it bittersweet happiness or a realization of something more profound?

Focus on Impact

With so few words, flash fiction relies on concise language and powerful imagery to deliver a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. It often leaves the reader wanting more, pondering the characters or situation.

Similar to Traditional Forms

While it can be experimental, flash fiction borrows elements from traditional fiction, such as plot, character development, and setting, but in miniature form.

Flash fiction is super short, like a quick snack instead of a whole dinner. However, they pack a punch that leaves you wanting more.

3. Graphic Novels and Manga

Manga, being a type of graphic novel, shares many of the reasons why graphic novels, in general, are considered a prominent part of 21st-century literature. These include:

Global Popularity Boom

In the 21st century, manga has experienced a global explosion in popularity. It’s no longer just a Japanese phenomenon but a worldwide medium enjoyed by readers of all ages. This mainstream acceptance elevates its status in the literary landscape.

Accessibility and Translation

The internet and digital platforms have made accessing and translating manga for international audiences easier than ever. This wider availability contributes to its recognition as a significant literary form.

Diverse Manga Genres

Like graphic novels, manga offers a wide range of genres beyond the traditional superhero stories. There’s historical fiction, romance, slice-of-life, and even philosophical explorations—something for everyone.

Artistic Innovation

Manga’s unique visual style continues to evolve, pushing boundaries and creating visually stunning narratives. This artistic merit adds to its value as a literary medium.

So, while manga has a long history in Japan, the 21st century has seen it become a global force. Its accessibility, diverse storytelling, and artistic innovation have secured its place as a respected and influential form of 21st century literature.

4. Text-Talk Novels

These novels incorporate texting language and slang, reflecting the way we communicate in the digital age. An example is “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green , which uses teenage texting language to create a relatable voice for its protagonist.

5. Creative Non-Fiction

What is creative non-fiction? Creative non-fiction combines the truth of traditional non-fiction with the storytelling techniques of fiction.

Here’s a deeper dive into their differences:

Traditional Non-Fiction:

• It focuses on facts and information:  Textbooks, biographies, historical accounts, and informative articles all fall under this category. Their primary goal is to educate the reader on a specific topic.
• It employs a straightforward style:  The writing is usually clear and concise, prioritizing the delivery of information over flowery language or suspense.
• It has limited use of literary devices:  You won’t find much figurative language or dramatic elements used extensively.

Creative Non-Fiction:

• It tells a compelling story:  Creative non-fiction uses narrative techniques like plot, character development, and setting to draw the reader in. It reads more like a story than a plain textbook.
• It uses an engaging writing style:  The author might use vivid descriptions, dialogue, and emotional language to create a more immersive experience.
• It borrows from fiction:  Techniques like scene breaks, cliffhangers, and flashbacks can be employed to keep the reader engaged.

Think of it this way: Traditional non-fiction is like a history lecture, focusing on facts and dates. Creative non-fiction is like a historical documentary that brings those facts to life with storytelling and visuals.

Here are some examples of creative non-fiction:

• Memoirs:  Personal stories about the author’s life experiences.
• Personal essays:  Reflective pieces that explore a theme or experience.
• Literary journalism:  In-depth reporting that uses creative writing techniques.
• Travel writing or travelogue:  Descriptive accounts of journeys that go beyond just listing locations.

Creative nonfiction allows writers to share true stories in a way that is both informative and engaging for the reader.

“The baby in the backpack” by Patricia Evangelista is a modern essay, which is an example of creative non-fiction.

6. Hyper Poetry

Hyper poetry is a form of digital poetry that utilizes hypertext markup. It allows for a non-linear structure where the poem is generated based on the reader’s chosen links. It can involve set words presented in variable order or parts of the poem that move and mutate.

This genre, related to hypertext fiction and visual arts, dates back to the mid-1980s and is primarily found online. Notable examples include “Penetration.”

The Bottom Line

The 21st century is a time of endless creativity in literature. New technologies and evolving communication styles continue to shape how we tell stories. As readers, we can explore a vast and ever-expanding landscape of genres. Whether you seek a captivating graphic novel, a thought-provoking hyperpoem, or a quick yet powerful flash fiction piece, there’s a genre waiting to ignite your imagination.

If you’re looking for more resources about  literature , then make sure to browse my  website .

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Literature and innovation: Probing into the Emerging Genres of 21st Century

2020, Language and literature: An Exploration, Cape Comorin Publisher Kanyakumari, Tamilnadu, India

Experimentation in writings or setting a new trend has always been in vogue in literature since time immemorial, because people are incessantly in search of better and innovative ways to express themselves. Classic genres like Poetry, drama, Fiction, nonfiction have evolved in to hundreds of sub genres to address the dynamic reality of the modern times. The new social, cultural, political, and philosophical verities shaped by Twentieth Century modernism, postmodernism; mainstreaming of feminism, colonialism, psycho analysis; catastrophes of the two world wars, emerging environmental and global issues gave birth to the huge innovations in literature due to which 21st century witnessed the emergence of new genres and different styles of writings. This chapter explores some selected genres like cyberpunk, climatic fiction, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, mythopoeic fiction and young adult fiction, which have been in consideration for their paramountcy of social and cultural innovations and have steered myriad of writers and readers. This chapter provides an intricate documentation of the nature (where, how, why) of emergence of these selected genres with their illustrative characteristics corroborated with congruous examples.

Related Papers

IQRA MANZOOR

Language and Literature: An Exploration, provides a thoughtful insight into the wide range of modern problems like, Loss of Identity located in the racial and collective memories of colonial past, Diasporic sensibility combined with racial discrimination, and incessant miserable condition of Dalit women as determined by patriarchy, casteism, and economic lack. Apprehension of current literary temper is availed through emerging genres of 21 century like Cyber Punk, Creative Nonfiction, Climatic Fiction, Flash Fiction, Mythopoeia, and Young Adult Fiction. An assessment of significant critical issues is provided, which ranges from the evaluation of the selected short stories of Munshi Pramchand and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi to the analysis of some selected novels of Rohinton Mistry and The Storm in Chandigharh and The Day in Shadow of Nayantara Sahgal. Besides this drastic critical endeavor, in this anthology considerable attention has been attributed to the how? Why? And what? Of the development of fundamental skills of English Language and role of literature in society. Language and Literature: An Exploration is a book Edited by Dr. Aif Rashid, co- authored by 11 authors and published by cape comorin publisher with ISBN no. 978-93-88761-63-5

Marek Oziewicz

One of the most popular fantasists today, Philip Pullman has been notorious for describing his personal and creative orientation in terms of three statements. One is the claim that his fiction is not fantasy but stark realism. Two is his disdain for other fantasy writers such as J. K. Rowling, J. R. R. Tolkien and especially C. S. Lewis as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia. Three is his staunch materialism and opposition to any form of supernaturalism, particularly of the religious ilk. This essay examines two of these three issues. Our focus is Pullman’s statements about fantasy and his declared self-positioning in regard to Lewis. Taking a closer look at His Dark Materials we argue is that Pullman’s work is fantasy, and that it fits the generic template of Lewisian fantasy much closer than Pullman would ever be willing to admit.

Thomas Honegger

Published in Thomas Honegger and Dirk Vanderbeke (eds.). 2014. From Peterborough To Faëry: The Poetics and Mechanics of Secondary Worlds. Cormarë Series 31. Zurich and Jena: Walking Tree Publishers, 113-140.

SFRA Review

Sumeyra Buran

Ronald L Boyer

Conny Lippert

Georgia Institute of Technology

Hank Blumenthal

A storyscape is the new medium of storytelling. It originates in the model of transmedia storytelling defined by Henry Jenkins (2006a) in Convergence Culture and applied to The Matrix franchise. The storyscape medium is conceptualized from the author/designer perspective as four gestalts that create a whole from stand-alone parts. The four gestalts are mythopoeia, character, canon, and genre. This approach frames the authoring of this story-centric model in opposition to the design approaches of world-building or storyworlds. The four gestalts also provide an academic approach that unites theory and practice with a unified design vocabulary and an orientation toward the creation of a cultural and creative product that is defined as the storyscape medium. Storyscapes, such as The Star Wars franchise or the Marvel Universe, consume the lion’s share of our cultural capital (Johnson 2014). Therefore, the development of a consistent vocabulary, a design approach, and an understanding of how they create meaning and define worldviews is critical to our understanding and practice of a new medium (Dena 2009). This recently ascendant medium (Johnson 2014) evolved from the affordances of digital media and the aggregation and remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000) of new and old media into a new medium. Starting with the frame of storytelling as a practice and previous aesthetic models such as The Poetics, this research charts the evolution of the storyscape medium across topics of academic transmedia approaches, principles, affordances, and the connecting or conceptualizing principles that act as gestalts. As a central contribution, this work develops a design vocabulary employed in practice across multiple established media. Henry Jenkins (2006a; 2007b; 2010a) worked to establish and define this new medium as a practice of transmedia storytelling but he did not name it. The field is haunted by the multiplicity of story forms that challenge a consistent approach or terminology. For example, canon was explored and defined by Geoffrey Long (2007) as the unifying principle, and Elizabeth Evans (2008) has investigated character as another central element of the transmedia storyscape. These terms and others are refined and coupled with design affordances then applied to my transmedia research project: The Ghost Club storyscape. I apply and validate the storyscape design method through a methodology of “research through design” using the gestalts and affordances that define the medium. A storyscape is a new, rich medium that can be authored and created with a common vocabulary. It implements the gestalts that allow us to design or imagine an expanded story medium with the breadth and power of an ecosystem that has the cultural descriptive capacity and meaning-making power of ancient religions and their extensive mythologies. It is an open work (Eco 1989), told across new and old media with their own affordances, that has the potential to be the most descriptive medium for approximating a complex narrative world without Aristotle’s beginning, middle, and end.

Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts

This essay examines a deeper narrative-theological endeavor which lies behind L’Engle’s Time Quartet, arguing that L'Engle was serious when she claimed that her fantasies were her theology. The Quartet is discussed on two levels. On one of them it reflects a search, through story, for a modern Christian universalist theology that would be compatible with science. On another level, L'Engle uses fantasy to express concerns with how technology and science, if misused, may jeopardize the humanness of humanity, if not the survival of the human race.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Natalia A Accossano Pérez

Overcoming Postmodernism: the Debate on New Italian Epic, Ed. Claudia Boscolo, London, "Journal of Romance Studies", 10. 1, (2010):51-67

Emanuela Piga Bruni

This article reconsiders features of the historical novel in the light of recent critical debates. Bearing in mind the overarching theme of the hybridization of the historiographic and literary genres, the article examines in detail Wu Ming’s Manituana (Wu Ming 2007a) and Wu Ming 4’s solo novel, Stella del mattino (Wu Ming 4 2008a). In both works the rewriting of historical characters follows a thread of verisimilitude against the backdrop of meticulously reconstructed historical scenarios. By focusing on these two novels, the aim is to underline the convergence of Wu Ming novels, in terms of intention and narrative techniques, with contemporary historiography. In so doing, emphasis is given to passages characterized by the representation of historical violence and passages in which the reader is able to grasp, among the scattered fragments of history, moments of the utopian impetus, thanks to the narration of communal moments of being and everyday life practices.

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Literature in the 21st Century

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by Ivo Oliveira  and Mithun Selvaratnam .

The crossroads of literature.

What do we talk about when we talk about literature? In the modern parlance, the term is associated with its academic context, referring to the enduring works of fiction, philosophy, history, etc. that have been studied for generations and shaped the foundations of our thought. Yet literature by its definition includes any and all written works, a fact that has never been more relevant than in our current Internet age, when the written word is more accessible and democratic than ever before.

The “death of print” has been much heralded over the past decade, precipitated by the rising accessibility of devices like tablets and smartphones that have made the electronic medium cheaper and more universal. Book sales, as well as magazine and newspaper subscriptions, have diminished, but our appetite for information has grown larger and more impetuous.

Major journalistic sources, which have always thrived off a mixture of concision and theatrics, have adapted to this shift. Twitter has created something of its own literary form, offering the use of hash tags to help convey a message within 160 characters. Blogs have afforded both individual writers and organizations, established or not, the opportunity of free publication. The hyper-textual nature of the Internet, aided by now ubiquitous social media, helps keep discussion flowing both around the world and around the clock. Online forums, which once belonged to a niche of dedicated computer enthusiasts, have been incorporated by most major news sites.

More “traditional” forms of literature, including novels, plays, and poetry, have been less successful in conforming to new technology. Various forms of “electronic literature,” including hypertext (interactive fiction), animated poetry, and even SMS (text-message) fiction have grown yet still exist within a small niche.

The dynamics commanded by the continuous change of technological progress, the incredible rate of advancement and the rapid shift of values which run pari passu with it, have kinesis as their key characteristic: a circulation of information and people where almost everything is dissolvable and dispensable.

But we have lost the optimism of the unifying potential of this kinesis. It has altered any notions of romanticism. Such a literary exercise is seen most in how authors have dealt with a post-9/11 world. Terrorism, clash and binding factors between civilizations or populist and cheap criticism have dominated these early years of the 21 st century.

Science fiction, therefore, has been rising in all its glory. This is because the dialectic between the world and the materiality of language which “describes” it centers its attention on the multiple fragmentation of a cultural “I”. The actant and his metamorphoses, in parallel with technological advancement, become a decanted discourse. It fights against its obsolescence by swapping our economic and social fabric with the unfamiliar. This destiny has actually been weaved since the 1950s.

The rise of science fiction is not disconnected from what the Theatre of the Absurd had already implemented. Entangled between the boundaries of modernism and post-modernism, Camus’s concept of Absurd, Beckett and Ionesco, among others, depart from the promises of a better man, his axiomatic language, and run through existential discourses on his failure and consequent world view. Kerouac’s “Beat Generation”, along with William S. Burroughs, dealt precisely with the roots of this fragmentation.

Therefore, although literature has to change with society, authors are still trying to address immutable human questions in new ways and reconcile them with the ever-changing technology that surrounds us.

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• Latin American literature - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Latin American literature - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

All of this literary production was accompanied by a strong essayistic tradition whose main topic was the distinctiveness of Latin American culture and, within that culture, the individual cultures of the various countries. Many of the poets and fiction writers mentioned before also wrote essays in this vein: Carpentier, Paz, Borges, Lezama Lima, and Sarduy, for example. But there were writers whose chief production was the essay: the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó , the Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui , the Mexicans José Vasconcelos and Alfonso Reyes , the Dominican Pedro Henríquez Ureña , the Venezuelan Mariano Picón Salas, the Cuban Fernando Ortiz , the Argentine Ezequiel Martínez Estrada , the Puerto Rican Antonio Pedreira, and the Colombian Germán Arciniegas . In many cases the issue was how to incorporate marginal cultures (African, Indian) within Latin America into the mainstream culture of the area and of each individual country. The most important and influential of these essays was Ariel (1900; Ariel ) by Rodó. In the wake of Spain’s humiliating defeat by the United States in the Spanish American War , Rodó muses about the differences between the cultures of North and South America. In reply to Sarmiento’s glorification of North American culture, Rodó calls for adherence to the spiritual, artistic values of Latin American culture, against the pragmatism and utilitarianism of the great new power to the north. His essay had such a positive reception that “Ariel clubs” were founded in various Latin American countries. Most of the essayistic tradition either followed Rodó or argued against him. In the 1920s Mariátegui proposed a Marxist interpretation of Peruvian society and culture in his 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana (1928; Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality ). Written in a lively style and surprisingly devoid of cant, Mariátegui’s essay argued in favour of an alliance between the political and artistic avant-gardes. A more scholarly approach was that of Ureña, whose elegant and profound Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión (1928; “Six Essays in Search of Our Mode of Expression”) provides a broad-ranging interpretation of Latin American culture going back to colonial times. In a similar vein, Mariano Picón Salas published in 1944 his De la conquista a la independencia: tres siglos de historia cultural hispanoamericana ( A Cultural History of Spanish America, from Conquest to Independence ). These essays were incorporated into the curricula of universities throughout the world. At midcentury a powerful essay by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz , El laberinto de la soledad (1950; The Labyrinth of Solitude ), offered an existentialist and psychoanalytic interpretation of Mexican culture. It had an enormous influence on Mexican fiction and poetry and was imitated by Latin American essayists elsewhere.

At the turn of the 21st century, Latin America literature seemed to be shifting from the modern to the postmodern . The line of demarcation is not clear. Postmodern literature avails itself of most of the techniques introduced by modern literature, particularly self-consciousness of its own status as literature. The difference, perhaps, is that postmodern literature does not aspire to be profound or pretend that it can make momentous pronouncements about the self, society, the nation, or humankind. The playful element of modern literature has prevailed, a move toward lightness. In Latin America this has meant moving away from the thematics of cultural identity that dominated modern literature and going back to the Romantics . Fiction was dispersed, disseminated among characters of shifting sexuality who did not make up conventional family groups. In the plots of these novels serendipity seems to rule. The herald of postmodern change had been Severo Sarduy . No writer of his stature or that of his predecessors (Borges, Cortázar, García Márquez, etc.) emerged to solidify this tendency. The most significant statement on postmodernism itself was provided by Cuban exile novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Antonio Benítez Rojo (1931), published in his La isla que se repite: el Caribe y la perspectiva postmoderna (1989; The Repeating Island ), a worthy successor to the essayistic tradition sketched before.

Fall 2024 Semester

Undergraduate courses.

Composition courses that offer many sections (ENGL 101, 201, 277 and 379) are not listed on this schedule unless they are tailored to specific thematic content or particularly appropriate for specific programs and majors.

• 100-200 level

ENGL 151.S01: Introduction to English Studies

Tuesday and Thursday, 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Sharon Smith

ENGL 151 serves as an introduction to both the English major and the discipline of English studies. In this class, you will develop the thinking, reading, writing and research practices that define both the major and the discipline. Much of the semester will be devoted to honing your literary analysis skills, and we will study and discuss texts from several different genres—poetry, short fiction, the novel, drama and film—as well as some literary criticism. As we do so, we will explore the language of the discipline, and you will learn a variety of key literary terms and concepts. In addition, you will develop your skills as both a writer and researcher within the discipline of English.

ENGL 201.ST1 Composition II: The Mind/Body Connection

In this section of English 201, students will use research and writing to learn more about problems that are important to them and articulate ways to address those problems. The course will focus specifically on issues related to the mind, the body and the relationship between them. The topics we will discuss during the course will include the correlation between social media and body image; the efficacy of sex education programs; the degree to which beliefs about race and gender influence school dress codes; and the unique mental and physical challenges faced by college students today. In this course, you will be learning about different approaches to argumentation, analyzing the arguments of others and constructing your own arguments. At the same time, you will be honing your skills as a researcher and developing your abilities as a persuasive and effective writer.

ENGL 201.S10 Composition II: Environmental Writing   

Monday/Wednesday/Friday 1-1:50 p.m.

Gwen Horsley

English 201 will help students develop the ability to think critically and analytically and to write effectively for other university courses and careers. This course will provide opportunities to develop analytical skills that will help students become critical readers and effective writers. Specifically, in this class, students will:

• Focus on the relationships between world environments, land, animals and humankind.
• Read various essays by environmental, conservational and regional authors.
• Produce student writings. 

Students will improve their writing skills by reading essays and applying techniques they witness in others’ work and those learned in class. This class is also a course in logical and creative thought. Students will write about humankind’s place in the world and our influence on the land and animals, places that hold special meaning to them or have influenced their lives and stories of their own families and their places and passions in the world. Students will practice writing in an informed and persuasive manner, in language that engages and enlivens readers by using vivid verbs and avoiding unnecessary passives, nominalizations and expletive constructions.

Students will prepare writing assignments based on readings and discussions of essays included in "Literature and the Environment " and other sources. They may use "The St. Martin’s Handbook," as well as other sources, to review grammar, punctuation, mechanics and usage as needed.

ENGL 201.13 Composition II: Writing the Environment

Tuesday and Thursday 9:30-10:45 a.m.

Paul Baggett

For generations, environmentalists have relied on the power of prose to change the minds and habits of their contemporaries. In the wake of fires, floods, storms and droughts, environmental writing has gained a new sense of urgency, with authors joining activists in their efforts to educate the public about the grim realities of climate change. But do they make a difference? Have reports of present and future disasters so saturated our airwaves that we no longer hear them? How do writers make us care about the planet amidst all the noise? In this course, students will examine the various rhetorical strategies employed by some of today’s leading environmental writers and filmmakers. And while analyzing their different arguments, students also will strengthen their own strategies of argumentation as they research and develop essays that explore a range of environmental concerns.

ENGL 201 Composition II: Food Writing

S17 Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-1:45 p.m.

S18 Tuesday and Thursday 2-3:15 p.m.

Jodi Andrews

In this composition class, students will critically analyze essays about food, food systems and environments, food cultures, the intersections of personal choice, market forces and policy and the values underneath these forces. Students will learn to better read like writers, noting authors’ purpose, audience organizational moves, sentence-level punctuation and diction. We will read a variety of essays including research-intensive arguments and personal narratives which intersect with one of our most primal needs as humans: food consumption. Students will rhetorically analyze texts, conduct advanced research, reflect on the writing process and write essays utilizing intentional rhetorical strategies. Through doing this work, students will practice the writing moves valued in every discipline: argument, evidence, concision, engaging prose and the essential research skills for the 21st century.

ENGL 221.S01 British Literature I

Michael S. Nagy

English 221 is a survey of early British literature from its inception in the Old English period with works such as "Beowulf" and the “Battle of Maldon,” through the Middle Ages and the incomparable writings of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain - poet, to the Renaissance and beyond. Students will explore the historical and cultural contexts in which all assigned reading materials were written, and they will bring that information to bear on class discussion. Likely themes that this class will cover include heroism, humor, honor, religion, heresy and moral relativity. Students will write one research paper in this class and sit for two formal exams: a midterm covering everything up to that point in the semester, and a comprehensive final. Probable texts include the following:

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages. Ed. Alfred David, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century and Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. George M. Logan, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K Lewalski, and M. H. Abrams. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. Ed. George M. Logan, Stephen Greenblatt, Barbara K Lewalski, and M. H. Abrams. 9th ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012.
• Gibaldi, Joseph. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 6th ed. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003.
• Any Standard College Dictionary.

ENGL 240.S01 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

Monday, Wednesday and Friday noon-12:50 p.m.

April Myrick

A survey of the history of literature written for children and adolescents, and a consideration of the various types of juvenile literature. Text selection will focus on the themes of imagination and breaking boundaries.

ENGL 240.ST1 Juvenile Literature Elementary-5th Grade

Randi Anderson

In English 240 students will develop the skills to interpret and evaluate various genres of literature for juvenile readers. This particular section will focus on various works of literature at approximately the K-5 grade level. We will read a large range of works that fall into this category, as well as information on the history, development and genre of juvenile literature.

Readings for this course include classical works such as "Hatchet," "Little Women", "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and "Brown Girl Dreaming," as well as newer works like "Storm in the Barn," "Anne Frank’s Diary: A Graphic Adaptation," "Lumberjanes," and a variety of picture books. These readings will be paired with chapters from "Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction " to help develop understanding of various genres, themes and concepts that are both related to juvenile literature and also present in our readings.

In addition to exposing students to various genres of writing (poetry, historical fiction, non-fiction, fantasy, picture books, graphic novels, etc.) this course will also allow students to engage in a discussion of larger themes present in these works such as censorship, race and gender. Students’ understanding of these works and concepts will be developed through readings, research, discussion posts, exams and writing assignments designed to get students to practice analyzing poetry, picture books, informational books and transitional/easy readers.

ENGL 241.S01: American Literature I

Tuesday and Thursday 12:30-1:45 p.m.

This course provides a broad, historical survey of American literature from the early colonial period to the Civil War. Ranging across historical periods and literary genres—including early accounts of contact and discovery, narratives of captivity and slavery, poetry of revolution, essays on gender equality and stories of industrial exploitation—this class examines how subjects such as colonialism, nationhood, religion, slavery, westward expansion, race, gender and democracy continue to influence how Americans see themselves and their society.

Required Texts

• The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Package 1, Volumes A and B Beginnings to 1865, Ninth Edition. (ISBN 978-0-393-26454-8)

ENGL 283.S01 Introduction to Creative Writing

Steven Wingate

Students will explore the various forms of creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and poetry) not one at a time in a survey format—as if there were decisive walls of separation between then—but as intensely related genres that share much of their creative DNA. Through close reading and work on personal texts, students will address the decisions that writers in any genre must face on voice, rhetorical position, relationship to audience, etc. Students will produce and revise portfolios of original creative work developed from prompts and research. This course fulfills the same SGR #2 requirements ENGL 201; note that the course will involve a research project. Successful completion of ENGL 101 (including by test or dual credit) is a prerequisite.

ENGL 283.S02 Introduction to Creative Writing

Jodilyn Andrews

This course introduces students to the craft of writing, with readings and practice in at least two genres (including fiction, poetry and drama).

ENGL 283.ST1 Introduction to Creative Writing

Amber Jensen, M.A., M.F.A.

This course explores creative writing as a way of encountering the world, research as a component of the creative writing process, elements of craft and their rhetorical effect and drafting, workshop and revision as integral parts of writing polished literary creative work. Student writers will engage in the research practices that inform the writing of literature and in the composing strategies and writing process writers use to create literary texts. Through their reading and writing of fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, students will learn about craft elements, find examples of those craft elements in published works and apply these elements in their own creative work, developed through weekly writing activities, small group and large group workshop and conferences with the instructor. Work will be submitted, along with a learning reflection and revision plan in each genre and will then be revised and submitted as a final portfolio at the end of the semester to demonstrate continued growth in the creation of polished literary writing.

• 300-400 level

ENGL 424.S01 Language Arts Methods grades 7-12  

Tuesday 6-8:50 p.m.

Danielle Harms

Techniques, materials and resources for teaching English language and literature to middle and secondary school students. Required of students in the English education option.

AIS/ENGL 447.S01: American Indian Literature of the Present 

Thursdays 3-6 p.m.

This course introduces students to contemporary works by authors from various Indigenous nations. Students examine these works to enhance their historical understanding of Indigenous peoples, discover the variety of literary forms used by those who identify as Indigenous writers, and consider the cultural and political significance of these varieties of expression. Topics and questions to be explored include:

• Genre: What makes Indigenous literature indigenous?
• Political and Cultural Sovereignty: Why have an emphasis on tribal specificity and calls for “literary separatism” emerged in recent decades, and what are some of the critical conversations surrounding such particularized perspectives?
• Gender and Sexuality: What are the intersecting concerns of Indigenous Studies and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and how might these research fields inform one another?
• Trans-Indigeneity: What might we learn by comparing works across different Indigenous traditions, and what challenges do such comparisons present?
• Aesthetics: How do Indigenous writers understand the dynamics between tradition and creativity?
• Visual Forms: What questions or concerns do visual representations (television and film) by or about Indigenous peoples present?

Possible Texts

• Akiwenzie-Damm, Kateri and Josie Douglas (eds), Skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing. IAD Press, 2000. (978-1864650327)
• Erdrich, Louise, The Sentence. Harper, 2021 (978-0062671127)
• Harjo, Joy, Poet Warrior: A Memoir. Norton, 2021 (978-0393248524)
• Harjo, Sterlin and Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs (selected episodes)
• Talty, Morgan. Night of the Living Rez, 2022, Tin House (978-1953534187)
• Wall Kimmerer, Robin. Braiding Sweet Grass, Milkweed Editions (978-1571313560)
• Wilson, Diane. The Seed Keeper: A Novel. Milkweed Editions (978-1571311375)
• Critical essays by Alexie, Allen, Cohen, Cox, King, Kroeber, Ortiz, Piatote, Ross and Sexton, Smith, Taylor, Teuton, Treuer, Vizenor, and Womack.

ENGL 472.S01: Film Criticism

Tuesdays 2-4:50 p.m.

Jason McEntee

Do you have an appreciation for, and enjoy watching, movies? Do you want to study movies in a genre-oriented format (such as those we typically call the Western, the screwball comedy, the science fiction or the crime/gangster, to name a few)? Do you want to explore the different critical approaches for talking and writing about movies (such as auteur, feminist, genre or reception)?

In this class, you will examine movies through viewing and defining different genres while, at the same time, studying and utilizing different styles of film criticism. You will share your discoveries in both class discussions and short writings. The final project will be a formal written piece of film criticism based on our work throughout the semester. The course satisfies requirements and electives for all English majors and minors, including both the Film Studies and Professional Writing minors. (Note: Viewing of movies outside of class required and may require rental and/or streaming service fees.)

ENGL 476.ST1: Fiction

In this workshop-based creative writing course, students will develop original fiction based on strong attention to the fundamentals of literary storytelling: full-bodied characters, robust story lines, palpable environments and unique voices. We will pay particular attention to process awareness, to the integrity of the sentence, and to authors' commitments to their characters and the places in which their stories unfold. Some workshop experience is helpful, as student peer critique will be an important element of the class.

ENGL 479.01 Capstone: The Gothic

Wednesday 3-5:50 p.m.

With the publication of Horace Walpole’s "The Castle of Otranto " in 1764, the Gothic officially came into being. Dark tales of physical violence and psychological terror, the Gothic incorporates elements such as distressed heroes and heroines pursued by tyrannical villains; gloomy estates with dark corridors, secret passageways and mysterious chambers; haunting dreams, troubling prophecies and disturbing premonitions; abduction, imprisonment and murder; and a varied assortment of corpses, apparitions and “monsters.” In this course, we will trace the development of Gothic literature—and some film—from the eighteenth-century to the present time. As we do so, we will consider how the Gothic engages philosophical beliefs about the beautiful and sublime; shapes psychological understandings of human beings’ encounters with horror, terror, the fantastic and the uncanny; and intervenes in the social and historical contexts in which it was written. We’ll consider, for example, how the Gothic undermines ideals related to domesticity and marriage through representations of domestic abuse, toxicity and gaslighting. In addition, we’ll discuss Gothic texts that center the injustices of slavery and racism. As many Gothic texts suggest, the true horrors of human existence often have less to do with inexplicable supernatural phenomena than with the realities of the world in which we live. 

ENGL 485.S01: Undergraduate Writing Center Learning Assistants 

Flexible Scheduling

Nathan Serfling

Since their beginnings in the 1920s and 30s, writing centers have come to serve numerous functions: as hubs for writing across the curriculum initiatives, sites to develop and deliver workshops and resource centers for faculty as well as students, among other functions. But the primary function of writing centers has necessarily and rightfully remained the tutoring of student writers. This course will immerse you in that function in two parts. During the first four weeks, you will explore writing center praxis—that is, the dialogic interplay of theory and practice related to writing center work. This part of the course will orient you to writing center history, key theoretical tenets and practical aspects of writing center tutoring. Once we have developed and practiced this foundation, you will begin work in the writing center as a tutor, responsible for assisting a wide variety of student clients with numerous writing tasks. Through this work, you will learn to actively engage with student clients in the revision of a text, respond to different student needs and abilities, work with a variety of writing tasks and rhetorical situations, and develop a richer sense of writing as a complex and negotiated social process.

Graduate Courses

Engl 572.s01: film criticism, engl 576.st1 fiction.

In this workshop-based creative writing course, students will develop original fiction based on strong attention to the fundamentals of literary storytelling: full-bodied characters, robust story lines, palpable environments and unique voices. We will pay particular attention to process awareness, to the integrity of the sentence and to authors' commitments to their characters and the places in which their stories unfold. Some workshop experience is helpful, as student peer critique will be an important element of the class.

ENGL 605.S01 Seminar in Teaching Composition

Thursdays 1-3:50 p.m.

This course will provide you with a foundation in the pedagogies and theories (and their attendant histories) of writing instruction, a foundation that will prepare you to teach your own writing courses at SDSU and elsewhere. As you will discover through our course, though, writing instruction does not come with any prescribed set of “best” practices. Rather, writing pedagogies stem from and continue to evolve because of various and largely unsettled conversations about what constitutes effective writing and effective writing instruction. Part of becoming a practicing writing instructor, then, is studying these conversations to develop a sense of what “good writing” and “effective writing instruction” might mean for you in our particular program and how you might adapt that understanding to different programs and contexts.

As we read about, discuss and research writing instruction, we will address a variety of practical and theoretical topics. The practical focus will allow us to attend to topics relevant to your immediate classroom practices: designing a curriculum and various types of assignments, delivering the course content and assessing student work, among others. Our theoretical topics will begin to reveal the underpinnings of these various practical matters, including their historical, rhetorical, social and political contexts. In other words, we will investigate the praxis—the dialogic interaction of practice and theory—of writing pedagogy. As a result, this course aims to prepare you not only as a writing teacher but also as a nascent writing studies/writing pedagogy scholar.

At the end of this course, you should be able to engage effectively in the classroom practices described above and participate in academic conversations about writing pedagogy, both orally and in writing. Assessment of these outcomes will be based primarily on the various writing assignments you submit and to a smaller degree on your participation in class discussions and activities.

ENGL 726.S01: The New Woman, 1880–1900s 

Thursdays 3–5:50 p.m.

Katherine Malone

This course explores the rise of the New Woman at the end of the nineteenth century. The label New Woman referred to independent women who rebelled against social conventions. Often depicted riding bicycles, smoking cigarettes and wearing masculine clothing, these early feminists challenged gender roles and sought broader opportunities for women’s employment and self-determination. We will read provocative fiction and nonfiction by New Women writers and their critics, including authors such as Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton, Amy Levy, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Grant Allen and George Gissing. We will analyze these exciting texts through a range of critical lenses and within the historical context of imperialism, scientific and technological innovation, the growth of the periodical press and discourse about race, class and gender. In addition to writing an argumentative seminar paper, students will complete short research assignments and lead discussion.

ENGL 792.ST1 Women in War: Female Authors and Characters in Contemporary War Lit

In this course, we will explore the voices of female authors and characters in contemporary literature of war. Drawing from various literary theories, our readings and discussion will explore the contributions of these voices to the evolving literature of war through archetypal and feminist criticism. We will read a variety of short works (both theoretical and creative) and complete works such as (selections subject to change): "Eyes Right" by Tracy Crow, "Plenty of Time When We Get Home" by Kayla Williams, "You Know When the Men are Gone" by Siobhan Fallon, "Still, Come Home" by Katie Schultz and "The Fine Art of Camouflage" by Lauren Johnson.