Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing
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Past it? Speed, simulacra, and celebrity in Rebecca F. Kuang’s ‘Yellowface’
Rebecca F. Kuang’s ‘Yellowface’ captivated readers, spending 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and winning the British Book Awards’ fiction prize. A sharp satire on celebrity, publishing, and cultural appropriation, it explores themes of fleeting fame and postmodern identity. Is Yellowface timely—or already dated?
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The careful book in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s ‘Brotherless Night’
V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Penguin, 2023) won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction, highlighting its powerful storytelling. Set during Sri Lanka’s civil war, the novel follows Sashi, a Tamil medical student, as she navigates care, ethics, and history in a time of violence. A masterpiece of careful, compassionate writing.
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Parallel forms in Victoria Chang’s ‘with my back to the world’
Content warning: this post discusses suicide Victoria Chang’s with my back to the world won the 2024 Forward Prize for Poetry. It’s a collection of poetry that is ekphrastic at its core: all the poems respond to fine art. Chang is only looking at one painter throughout the collection. Agnes Martin was an American abstract…
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Surviving solitude in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s ‘Small Worlds’
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds is a celebration of love, music, and community. Through jazz, dance, and shared experiences, the novel explores the beauty of connection and the pain of isolation. With lyrical prose, Nelson reminds us that to be ‘open’ is to be free—and that small worlds sustain us.
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Learning to read Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’
Samantha Harvey‘s delicate 136-page novel Orbital won 2024’s Booker Prize. It marks a notable shift of the difficulty of the last few Booker winners—Lynch’s Prophet Song (2023), Karunatilaka’s Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022), Galgut’s The Promise (2021), and Stuart’s Shuggie Bain (2020)—to an easier style, even if not a typical plot of a novel.…
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The true reality of dreams in Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’
In 2024, South Korea’s Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a 54-year-old author of eleven novels—only five of which have been translated into English—Han was viewed by some as an unexpected choice. The Swedish Academy—awarders of the Nobel Prize—praised Han ‘for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the…
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