Hyper-contemporary literature: brand-new writing
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Bastardising epic: Shehean Karunatilaka’s ‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’
Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Sort of Books, 2022) won last year’s Booker Prize for its ‘energy, imagery and ideas [set] against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars’. We find that ‘surreal vision’ in its depiction of the afterlife—both the In Between (a version of purgatory), and the…
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Seeing is remembering: the photograph in Annie Ernaux’s ‘The Years’
Annie Ernaux is the latest name to grace the list of Nobel Prize winners in Literature. She was awarded in 2022 for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory. Nobel Prize awarding committee The sense of ‘clinical acuity’ combined with the richness of ‘personal…
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Exhaustion and exhaustive: Colum McCann’s ‘Apeirogon’
Colum McCann’s Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, 2020) is a novel. I know this because it tells me both on the cover of the hardback edition, and in the acknowledgements. In the latter, McCann explains that this is a hybrid novel with invention at its core, a work of storytelling which, like all storytelling, weaves together elements of…
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Top 5 blogs of 2020
The new year will soon be heralded by new blogs from me. But for now, here’s a list of my Top 5 blogs of 2020 according to views. Apart from anything else, the list provides an interesting snapshot of last year’s popular and thought-provoking books … Enjoy, and thanks for reading this blog in 2020!…
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Trans* today or yesterday? Andrea Lawlor’s ‘Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl’
In a 2017 book Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter?, Heath Fogg Davis asks: ‘Why not use transgender experience to fundamentally question the social custom of administrating sex?'[1] Using a queer logic that has roots in poststructural theory—the intricacies of which don’t need elaborating here—Davis joins two arguments. First, he argues that sex-identity discrimination—which ‘involves judgments…
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What is hyper-contemporary literature?
This blog is entirely concerned with what I am terming hyper-contemporary literature. But what is hyper-contemporary literature, and how does it differ from any other kind of literature? When we read literature, the word ‘contemporary’ can mean two things. First, it means the historical moment of the text’s production. For Shakespeare’s plays, this is the…
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