Contemporary American Novelists

Contemporary American Novelists: A Deep Dive into Modern Literary Voices

Introduction:

American literature continues to evolve, producing a vibrant tapestry of voices and styles. This post delves into the captivating world of contemporary American novelists, exploring the diverse landscape of their works, their thematic concerns, and their impact on the literary world. We'll examine prominent authors, discuss key trends, and uncover the reasons behind their enduring appeal and influence. Whether you're a seasoned bookworm or a curious newcomer, prepare to embark on a journey through the compelling narratives shaping American literature today. We'll cover everything from the raw realism of certain authors to the lyrical prose of others, highlighting the key themes and stylistic choices that define their contributions.

I. Defining "Contemporary" and the Shifting Sands of Literary Landscape:

Defining "contemporary" can be tricky. For the purposes of this article, we'll consider contemporary American novelists as those actively publishing and significantly influencing the literary scene from the late 20th century to the present day. This era has witnessed a profound shift in literary styles and themes, moving away from traditional forms and embracing experimentation, diverse perspectives, and a greater focus on social and political realities. This section will explore the key factors driving these changes, including technological advancements, evolving social norms, and the rise of diverse voices challenging established narratives. We will also discuss how globalization and increased access to international literature have impacted American authors and their work.

II. Masters of Realism: Exploring the Gritty Depictions of American Life:

Many contemporary American novelists excel in depicting the harsh realities of American life. This section will analyze authors who masterfully portray the struggles of everyday people, often focusing on themes of poverty, social injustice, and the complexities of human relationships. We'll examine their unique writing styles, their choice of settings, and how they use realism to create compelling and thought-provoking narratives. Key authors included in this section will be assessed based on their impact and contribution to contemporary American literature. Examples might include authors known for their unflinching portrayals of marginalized communities or their exploration of socioeconomic disparities.

III. The Rise of Literary Fiction and Experimental Narrative Techniques:

Contemporary American fiction has witnessed a resurgence of literary experimentation. This section delves into the innovative narrative techniques employed by authors pushing the boundaries of traditional storytelling. We'll examine the use of fragmented narratives, stream-of-consciousness, metafiction, and other experimental forms. We'll analyze how these techniques contribute to the overall meaning and impact of their works, exploring their relationship to postmodernism and other literary movements. The discussion will also include notable authors who have pioneered new narrative forms and styles.

IV. Diverse Voices and the Expanding Canon:

One of the most significant developments in contemporary American literature is the increasing representation of diverse voices and perspectives. This section will celebrate authors from marginalized communities, highlighting their unique contributions to the literary landscape. We will examine how their experiences shape their narratives, and discuss the importance of their work in challenging dominant narratives and fostering greater inclusivity. This section will encompass a wide range of identities and experiences, including race, gender, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic background.

V. Contemporary American Novelists and Their Enduring Legacy:

The final section reflects on the overall impact of contemporary American novelists on the literary world and beyond. We'll discuss their influence on popular culture, their contribution to social and political discourse, and their lasting impact on future generations of writers. This section will also speculate on the future of American literature, considering the ongoing evolution of literary styles and thematic concerns.


Book Outline: "Navigating the Modern American Novel"

Introduction: A brief overview of the book's scope and purpose, defining "contemporary" and outlining the key themes explored.

Chapter 1: The Roots of Contemporary American Fiction: Tracing the evolution of American literature from the late 20th century to the present, highlighting key influences and transitions.

Chapter 2: Masters of Realism: In-depth analysis of specific authors known for their realistic depictions of American life, including stylistic choices and thematic concerns.

Chapter 3: Experimentation and Innovation: Examining authors who employ experimental narrative techniques, analyzing their impact and influence on contemporary fiction.

Chapter 4: Voices of Diversity: Celebrating the contributions of authors from diverse backgrounds, analyzing their unique perspectives and the importance of their work.

Chapter 5: The Legacy and Future of Contemporary American Fiction: Reflecting on the lasting impact of contemporary American novelists and speculating on the future of the genre.

Conclusion: A summary of the key arguments and a final reflection on the richness and diversity of contemporary American literature.


Detailed Explanation of Book Outline Points:

Each chapter in the book would delve deeply into the specific topics outlined above, providing detailed analysis of individual authors' works, exploring their thematic concerns, and analyzing their stylistic choices. Chapter 2, for example, might focus on authors such as Richard Price, whose gritty realism captures the complexities of urban life, or Cormac McCarthy, whose stark prose portrays the harsh realities of the American West. Chapter 3 could explore the experimental narratives of authors like David Foster Wallace or Don DeLillo, analyzing their use of metafiction and unconventional narrative structures. Chapter 4 would offer a detailed analysis of contemporary authors from diverse backgrounds, discussing their contributions to the literary landscape and examining the unique challenges and perspectives they bring to their writing.


9 Unique FAQs:

1. What defines a "contemporary" American novelist? This answer would discuss the time frame, stylistic trends, and thematic concerns that characterize contemporary American fiction.
2. Who are some of the most influential contemporary American novelists? This would list key figures and briefly explain their significance.
3. How has the rise of diverse voices changed American literature? This would highlight the impact of authors from marginalized communities and the increased representation in the literary canon.
4. What are some common themes explored in contemporary American novels? This would list and explain major recurring themes.
5. How has technology impacted the writing and publishing of contemporary American novels? This would explore the influence of e-books, online publishing, and social media.
6. What are some key differences between contemporary and classic American novels? This would compare stylistic approaches, thematic concerns, and narrative techniques.
7. What are some resources for discovering new contemporary American novelists? This would suggest websites, literary magazines, and book recommendations.
8. Are there any recurring stylistic trends in contemporary American fiction? This would discuss common narrative techniques and literary styles.
9. How can I improve my understanding and appreciation of contemporary American novels? This would offer advice on reading strategies, critical analysis, and engagement with literary criticism.


9 Related Articles:

1. The Best Contemporary American Crime Novels: A list and review of notable crime fiction.
2. Contemporary American Women Writers: A Celebration of Female Voices: A focused look at female authors and their contributions.
3. The Impact of Postmodernism on Contemporary American Novels: An analysis of postmodern influences on current literature.
4. Exploring Themes of Identity in Contemporary American Fiction: An analysis of how identity is portrayed in contemporary narratives.
5. Contemporary American Dystopian Novels: A Look at the Future (or Lack Thereof): A review of dystopian novels and their social commentary.
6. The Rise of Literary Magazines and their Role in Promoting Contemporary American Authors: An exploration of the role of literary magazines in the publishing world.
7. Contemporary American Novelists and the Political Landscape: An exploration of how politics influences contemporary literature.
8. A Comparative Study: Contemporary American vs. British Novelists: A comparison of the two literary traditions.
9. How to Write a Contemporary American Novel: A Guide for Aspiring Authors: A practical guide for writers interested in exploring contemporary themes and styles.


  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Novelists of the Absurd Charles H. Harris, Charles B. Harris, 1972-07 To find more information about Rowman and Littlefield titles, please visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life Alexandra Kingston-Reese, 2020-01-01 Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Novelists Carl Van Doren, 2017-05-24 This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) Carl Van Doren, 2023-08-12 Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) by Carl Van Doren. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Women Writers Catherine Rainwater, Willliam J. Scheick, 2021-05-11 Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression. The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are lamentably absent from modern experience or which mysteriously elude language. For Kingston and Walker, verbal assertiveness is the focus of narratives depicting the gradual empowerment of female protagonists who learn to speak themselves into existence. Ozick and Tyler disrupt conventional reader expectations of the anti-novel and the family novel, respectively. Finally, Morrison's and Piercy's works reveal how traditional narrative forms such as the Bildungsroman and the soap opera are adaptable to feminist purposes. In examining the writings of these ten important women authors, this book illuminates a significant moment in literary history when women's voices are profoundly reshaping American literary tradition.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) Carl Van Doren, 2015-03-23 [...]inarticulate except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings-a modern Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro-into a stock figure who in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity.[...].
  contemporary american novelists: Sabrina & Corina Kali Fajardo-Anstine, 2019-04-02 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection—a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands. “Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart.”—Sandra Cisneros WINNER OF THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE STORY PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION Kali Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force. In “Sugar Babies,” ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. “Any Further West” follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In “Tomi,” a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, “Sabrina & Corina,” a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual. Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal “Sabrina & Corina isn’t just good, it’s masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth.”—Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents “[A] powerhouse debut . . . stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters.”—Rigoberto González, NBC News
  contemporary american novelists: Contested Spaces in Contemporary North American Novels Şemsettin Tabur, 2018-09-30 This volume investigates the ways in which Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, and Carolyn See’s There Will Never Be Another You engage with the physical, ideological, and socially constructed “real-and-imagined” spaces of colonialism, justice, diaspora, and risk. Building on a range of theoretical approaches to the production of space, this study argues for the significance of literature as a cartographic practice charting the intricacies of the socio-spatiality of human life. Through rigorous readings, this book examines each novel as a critical map that both represents and explores contested spaces and alternative spatial negotiations. These spatially oriented literary analyses contribute to recent conceptualizations of space as socially and relationally produced, open, dynamic, and contested, and enrich the existing scholarship on the novels discussed here.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Novelists Harry Thornton Moore, 1964 Also contains criticism of William Styron.
  contemporary american novelists: Thomas Pynchon Simon Malpas, Andrew Taylor, 2015-08-01 Now available in paperback, this is a comprehensive study of the most influential figure in postwar American literature. Over a writing career spanning more than fifty years, Thomas Pynchon has been at the forefront of America’s engagement with postmodern literary possibilities. In chapters that address the full range of Pynchon’s career, from his earliest short stories and first novel, V., to his most recent work, this book offers highly accessible and detailed readings of a writer whose work is indispensable to understanding how the American novel has met the challenges of postmodernity. The authors discuss Pynchon’s relationship to literary history, his engagement with discourses of science and utopianism, his interrogation of imperialism and his preoccupation with the paranoid sensibility. Invaluable to Pynchon scholars and to everyone working in the field of contemporary American fiction, this study explores how Pynchon’s complex narratives work both as exuberant examples of formal experimentation and as serious interventions in the political health of the nation.
  contemporary american novelists: Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction Kenneth Millard, 2007-04-18 This book explores the ways in which a range of recent American novelists have handled the genre of the 'coming-of-age' novel, or the Bildungsroman. Novels of this genre characteristically dramatise the vicissitudes of growing up and the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, often presented through depictions of immediate family relationships and other social structures. This book considers a variety of different American cultures (in terms of race, class and gender) and a range of contemporary coming-of-age novels, so that aesthetic judgements about the fiction might be made in the context of the social history that fiction represents. A series of questions are asked:* Does the coming-of-age moment in these novels coincide with an interpretation of the 'fall' of America?* What kind of national commentary does it therefore facilitate?* Is the Bildungsroman a quintessentially American genre?* What can it usefully tell us about contemporary American culture? Although the focus is on the conte
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Women Fiction Writers Laurie Champion, Rhonda Austin, 2002-11-30 American women writers have long been creating an extraordinarily diverse and vital body of fiction, particularly in the decades since World War II. Recent authors have benefited from the struggles of their predecessors, who broke through barriers that denied women opportunities for self-expression. This reference highlights American women writers who continue to build upon the formerly male-dominated canon. Included are alphabetically arranged entries for more than 60 American women writers of diverse ethnicity who wrote or published their most significant fiction after World War II. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and includes:^L^DBLA brief biography^L^DBLA discussion of major works and themes^^DBLA survey of the writer's critical reception^L^DBLA bibliography of primary and secondary sources
  contemporary american novelists: Fleishman Is in Trouble Taffy Brodesser-Akner, 2019-06-18 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “A masterpiece” (NPR) about marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition Coming soon as an FX limited series on Hulu, starring Claire Danes, Jesse Eisenberg, Lizzy Caplan, and Adam Brody ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Entertainment Weekly, The New York Public Library ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, The Washington Post, USA Today Vanity Fair, Vogue, NPR, Chicago Tribune, GQ, Vox, Refinery29, Elle, The Guardian, Real Simple, Financial Times, Parade, Good Housekeeping, New Statesman, Marie Claire, Town & Country, Evening Standard, Thrillist, Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, BookRiot, Shelf Awareness Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this. As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place. A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope. Alma’s Best Jewish Novel of the Year • Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for Best First Book
  contemporary american novelists: A Place for Us Fatima Farheen Mirza, 2018-06-12 AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD “5 UNDER 35” NOMINEE • NEW YORK’S “ONE BOOK, ONE NEW YORK” PICK Named One of the Best Books of the Year: Washington Post • NPR • People • Refinery29 • Parade • BuzzFeed “Mirza writes with a mercy that encompasses all things.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post Hailed as “a book for our times” (Christiane Amanpour), A Place for Us is a deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging. As an Indian wedding gathers a family back together, parents Rafiq and Layla must reckon with the choices their children have made. There is Hadia: their headstrong, eldest daughter, whose marriage is a match of love and not tradition. Huda, the middle child, determined to follow in her sister’s footsteps. And lastly, their estranged son, Amar, who returns to the family fold for the first time in three years to take his place as brother of the bride. What secrets and betrayals have caused this close-knit family to fracture? Can Amar find his way back to the people who know and love him best? A Place for Us takes us back to the beginning of this family’s life: from the bonds that bring them together, to the differences that pull them apart. All the joy and struggle of family life is here, from Rafiq and Layla’s own arrival in America from India, to the years in which their children—each in their own way—tread between two cultures, seeking to find their place in the world, as well as a path home. A Place for Us is a book for our times: an astonishingly tender-hearted novel of identity and belonging, and a resonant portrait of what it means to be an American family today. It announces Fatima Farheen Mirza as a major new literary talent.
  contemporary american novelists: The Daemon Knows Harold Bloom, 2015-05-12 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWS Hailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now he turns at long last to his beloved writers of our national literature in an expansive and mesmerizing book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom’s most masterly book yet. Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers’ works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon”—the spark of genius or Orphic muse—in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors. As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon. Praise for The Daemon Knows “Enrapturing . . . radiant . . . intoxicating . . . Harold Bloom, who bestrides our literary world like a willfully idiosyncratic colossus, belongs to the party of rapture.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “The capstone to a lifetime of thinking, writing and teaching . . . The primary strength of The Daemon Knows is the brilliance and penetration of the connections Bloom makes among the great writers of the past, the shrewd sketching of intellectual feuds or oppositions that he calls agons. . . . Bloom’s books are like a splendid map of literature, a majestic aerial view that clarifies what we cannot see from the ground.”—The Washington Post “Audacious . . . The Yale literary scholar has added another remarkable treatise to his voluminous body of work.”—The Huffington Post “The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.”—John Ashbery “Mesmerizing.”—New York Journal of Books “Bloom is a formidable critic, an extravagant intellect.”—Chicago Tribune “As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Few people write criticism as nakedly confident as Bloom’s any more.”—The Guardian (U.K.)
  contemporary american novelists: The Incendiaries R. O. Kwon, 2018-07-31 Now a National Bestseller Religion, politics, and love collide in this slim but powerful novel reminiscent of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with menace and mystery lurking in every corner. --People Magazine The most buzzed-about debut of the summer, as it should be...unusual and enticing ... The Incendiaries arrives at precisely the right moment. --The Washington Post Radiant...A dark, absorbing story of how first love can be as intoxicating and dangerous as religious fundamentalism. --New York Times Book Review A powerful, darkly glittering novel of violence, love, faith, and loss, as a young woman at an elite American university is drawn into a cult's acts of terrorism. Phoebe Lin and Will Kendall meet in their first month at prestigious Edwards University. Phoebe is a glamorous girl who doesn't tell anyone she blames herself for her mother's recent death. Will is a misfit scholarship boy who transfers to Edwards from Bible college, waiting tables to get by. What he knows for sure is that he loves Phoebe. Grieving and guilt-ridden, Phoebe is drawn into a secretive cult founded by a charismatic former student with an enigmatic past. When the group commits a violent act in the name of faith, Will finds himself struggling to confront a new version of the fanaticism he's worked so hard to escape. Haunting and intense, The Incendiaries is a fractured love story that explores what can befall those who lose what they love most.
  contemporary american novelists: Anything Can Happen Tom LeClair, Larry McCaffery, 1983
  contemporary american novelists: The Most Fun We Ever Had Claire Lombardo, 2021-04-06 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • “A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory.” —Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe In this “rich, complex family saga” (USA Today) full of long-buried family secrets, Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of unrest. Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home-mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. With the unexpected arrival of young Jonah Bendt—a child placed for adoption by one of the daughters fifteen years before—the Sorensons will be forced to reckon with the rich and varied tapestry of their past. As they grapple with years marred by adolescent angst, infidelity, and resentment, they also find the transcendent moments of joy that make everything else worthwhile.
  contemporary american novelists: Sour Heart Jenny Zhang, 2017-08-01 A sly debut story collection that conjures the experience of adolescence through the eyes of Chinese American girls growing up in New York City—for readers of Zadie Smith and Helen Oyeyemi. Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction • Finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • NPR • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Guardian • Esquire • New York • BuzzFeed A fresh new voice emerges with the arrival of Sour Heart, establishing Jenny Zhang as a frank and subversive interpreter of the immigrant experience in America. Her stories cut across generations and continents, moving from the fraught halls of a public school in Flushing, Queens, to the tumultuous streets of Shanghai, China, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. In the absence of grown-ups, latchkey kids experiment on each other until one day the experiments turn violent; an overbearing mother abandons her artistic aspirations to come to America but relives her glory days through karaoke; and a shy loner struggles to master English so she can speak to God. Narrated by the daughters of Chinese immigrants who fled imperiled lives as artists back home only to struggle to stay afloat—dumpster diving for food and scamming Atlantic City casino buses to make a buck—these seven stories showcase Zhang’s compassion, moral courage, and a perverse sense of humor reminiscent of Portnoy’s Complaint. A darkly funny and intimate rendering of girlhood, Sour Heart examines what it means to belong to a family, to find your home, leave it, reject it, and return again. Praise for Sour Heart “[Jenny Zhang’s] coming-of-age tales are coarse and funny, sweet and sour, told in language that’s rough-hewn yet pulsating with energy.”—USA Today “One of the knockout fiction debuts of the year.”—New York “Compelling writing about what it means to be a teenager . . . It’s brilliant, it’s dark, but it’s also humorous and filled with love.”—Isaac Fitzgerald, Today “[A] combustible collection . . . in a class of its own.”—Booklist (starred review) “Gorgeous and grotesque . . . [a] tremendous debut.”—Slate
  contemporary american novelists: The Great Believers Rebecca Makkai, 2018-06-19 PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF 2018 LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER ALA CARNEGIE MEDAL WINNER THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD WINNER Soon to Be a Major Television Event, optioned by Amy Poehler • One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “A page turner . . . An absorbing and emotionally riveting story about what it’s like to live during times of crisis.” —The New York Times Book Review A dazzling novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister. Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster. Named a Best Book of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, The Seattle Times, Bustle, Newsday, AM New York, BookPage, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lit Hub, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, New York Public Library and Chicago Public Library
  contemporary american novelists: American Spy Lauren Wilkinson, 2019-02-12 “American Spy updates the espionage thriller with blazing originality.”—Entertainment Weekly “There has never been anything like it.”—Marlon James, GQ “So much fun . . . Like the best of John le Carré, it’s extremely tough to put down.”—NPR NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY CHICAGO TRIBUNE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • NPR • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • BuzzFeed • Vulture • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping • The New York Public Library What if your sense of duty required you to betray the man you love? It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes. Yes, even though she secretly admires the work Sankara is doing for his country. Yes, even though she is still grieving the mysterious death of her sister, whose example led Marie to this career path in the first place. Yes, even though a furious part of her suspects she’s being offered the job because of her appearance and not her talent. In the year that follows, Marie will observe Sankara, seduce him, and ultimately have a hand in the coup that will bring him down. But doing so will change everything she believes about what it means to be a spy, a lover, a sister, and a good American. Inspired by true events—Thomas Sankara is known as “Africa’s Che Guevara”—American Spy knits together a gripping spy thriller, a heartbreaking family drama, and a passionate romance. This is a face of the Cold War you’ve never seen before, and it introduces a powerful new literary voice. NOMINATED FOR THE NAACP IMAGE AWARD • Shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize “Spy fiction plus allegory, and a splash of pan-Africanism. What could go wrong? As it happens, very little. Clever, bracing, darkly funny, and really, really good.”—Ta-Nehisi Coates “Inspired by real events, this espionage thriller ticks all the right boxes, delivering a sexually charged interrogation of both politics and race.”—Esquire “Echoing the stoic cynicism of Hurston and Ellison, and the verve of Conan Doyle, American Spy lays our complicities—political, racial, and sexual—bare. Packed with unforgettable characters, it’s a stunning book, timely as it is timeless.”—Paul Beatty, Man Booker Prizewinning author of The Sellout
  contemporary american novelists: Before We Were Yours Lisa Wingate, 2017-06-06 THE BLOCKBUSTER HIT—Over two million copies sold! A New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Publishers Weekly Bestseller “Poignant, engrossing.”—People • “Lisa Wingate takes an almost unthinkable chapter in our nation’s history and weaves a tale of enduring power.”—Paula McLain Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty. Aiken, South Carolina, present day. Born into wealth and privilege, Avery Stafford seems to have it all: a successful career as a federal prosecutor, a handsome fiancé, and a lavish wedding on the horizon. But when Avery returns home to help her father weather a health crisis, a chance encounter leaves her with uncomfortable questions and compels her to take a journey through her family’s long-hidden history, on a path that will ultimately lead either to devastation or to redemption. Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong. Publishers Weekly’s #3 Longest-Running Bestseller of 2017 • Winner of the Southern Book Prize • If All Arkansas Read the Same Book Selection This edition includes a new essay by the author about shantyboat life.
  contemporary american novelists: Beyond Gatsby Robert McParland, 2015-04-16 Many of the heralded writers of the 20th century—including Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—first made their mark in the 1920s, while established authors like Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis produced some of their most important works during this period. Classic novels such as The Sun Also Rises, The Great Gatsby, Elmer Gantry, and The Sound and the Fury not only mark prodigious advances in American fiction, they show us the wonder, the struggle, and the promise of the American dream. In Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture, Robert McParland looks at the key contributions of this fertile period in literature. Rather than provide a compendium of details about major American writers, this book explores the culture that created F. Scott Fitzgerald and his literary contemporaries. The source material ranges from the minutes of reading circles and critical commentary in periodicals to the archives of writers’ works—as well as the diaries, journals, and letters of common readers. This work reveals how the nation’s fiction stimulated conversations of shared images and stories among a growing reading public. Signifying a cultural shift in the aftermath of World War I, the collective works by these authors represent what many consider to be a golden age of American literature. By examining how these authors influenced the reading habits of a generation, Beyond Gatsby enables readers to gain a deeper comprehension of how literature shapes culture.
  contemporary american novelists: When We Left Cuba Chanel Cleeton, 2019-04-09 Instant New York Times bestseller! In 1960s Florida, a young Cuban exile will risk her life—and heart—to take back her country in this exhilarating historical novel from the author of The Last Train to Key West and Next Year in Havana, a Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick. Beautiful. Daring. Deadly. The Cuban Revolution took everything from sugar heiress Beatriz Perez—her family, her people, her country. Recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Fidel Castro's inner circle and pulled into the dangerous world of espionage, Beatriz is consumed by her quest for revenge and her desire to reclaim the life she lost. As the Cold War swells like a hurricane over the shores of the Florida Strait, Beatriz is caught between the clash of Cuban American politics and the perils of a forbidden affair with a powerful man driven by ambitions of his own. When the ever-changing tides of history threaten everything she has fought for, she must make a choice between her past and future—but the wrong move could cost Beatriz everything—not just the island she loves, but also the man who has stolen her heart...
  contemporary american novelists: The Farm Joanne Ramos, 2019-05-07 Life is a lucrative business, as long as you play by the rules. [Joanne] Ramos's debut novel couldn't be more relevant or timely. --O: The Oprah Magazine (25 Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2019) Nestled in New York's Hudson Valley is a luxury retreat boasting every amenity: organic meals, personal fitness trainers, daily massages--and all of it for free. In fact, you're paid big money to stay here--more than you've ever dreamed of. The catch? For nine months, you cannot leave the grounds, your movements are monitored, and you are cut off from your former life while you dedicate yourself to the task of producing the perfect baby. For someone else. Jane, an immigrant from the Philippines, is in desperate search of a better future when she commits to being a Host at Golden Oaks--or the Farm, as residents call it. But now pregnant, fragile, consumed with worry for her family, Jane is determined to reconnect with her life outside. Yet she cannot leave the Farm or she will lose the life-changing fee she'll receive on the delivery of her child. Gripping, provocative, heartbreaking, The Farm pushes to the extremes our thinking on motherhood, money, and merit and raises crucial questions about the trade-offs women will make to fortify their futures and the futures of those they love. Advance praise for The Farm This topical, provocative debut anatomizes class, race and the American dream. --The Guardian, What You'll Be Reading This Year Wow, Joanne Ramos has written the page-turner about immigrants chasing what's left of the American dream. . . . Truly unforgettable. --Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story and Lake Success A highly original and provocative story about the impossible choices in so many women's lives. These characters will stay with me for a long time. --Karen Thompson Walker, New York Times bestselling author of The Age of Miracles and The Dreamers Ramos has written a firecracker of a novel, at once caustic and tender, page-turning and thought-provoking. This is a fierce indictment of the vampiric nature of modern capitalism, which never loses sight of the very human stories at its center. . . . Highly recommended. --Madeline Miller, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Circe
  contemporary american novelists: Beyond Bolaño Héctor Hoyos, 2015-01-27 Through a comparative analysis of the novels of Roberto Bolaño and the fictional work of César Aira, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Chico Buarque, Alberto Fuguet, and Fernando Vallejo, among other leading authors, Héctor Hoyos defines and explores new trends in how we read and write in a globalized era. Calling attention to fresh innovations in form, voice, perspective, and representation, he also affirms the lead role of Latin American authors in reshaping world literature. Focusing on post-1989 Latin American novels and their representation of globalization, Hoyos considers the narrative techniques and aesthetic choices Latin American authors make to assimilate the conflicting forces at work in our increasingly interconnected world. Challenging the assumption that globalization leads to cultural homogenization, he identifies the rich textual strategies that estrange and re-mediate power relations both within literary canons and across global cultural hegemonies. Hoyos shines a light on the unique, avant-garde phenomena that animate these works, such as modeling literary circuits after the dynamics of the art world, imagining counterfactual Nazi histories, exposing the limits of escapist narratives, and formulating textual forms that resist worldwide literary consumerism. These experiments help reconfigure received ideas about global culture and advance new, creative articulations of world consciousness.
  contemporary american novelists: We Two Alone Jack Wang, 2020-09-01 Winner, 2020 Danuta Gleed Award A masterful collection of stories that dramatizes the Chinese diaspora across the globe over the past hundred years, We Two Alone is Jack Wang’s astonishing debut work of fiction. Set on five continents and spanning nearly a century, We Two Alone traces the long arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple gets caught in the outbreak of violence in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The consul general of China attempts to save lives following Kristallnacht in Vienna. A family aspires to buy a home in South Africa, during the rise of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife. From the vulnerable and disenfranchised to the educated and elite, the characters in this extraordinary collection embody the diversity of the diaspora at key moments in history and in contemporary times. Jack Wang has crafted deeply affecting stories that not only subvert expectations but contend with mortality and delicately draw out the intimacies and failings of love.
  contemporary american novelists: Remembering the Past in Contemporary African American Fiction Keith Byerman, 2006-05-18 With close readings of more than twenty novels by writers including Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman, Keith Byerman examines the trend among African American novelists of the late twentieth century to write about black history rather than about their own present. Employing cultural criticism and trauma theory, Byerman frames these works as survivor narratives that rewrite the grand American narrative of individual achievement and the march of democracy. The choice to write historical narratives, he says, must be understood historically. These writers earned widespread recognition for their writing in the 1980s, a period of African American commercial success, as well as the economic decline of the black working class and an increase in black-on-black crime. Byerman contends that a shared experience of suffering joins African American individuals in a group identity, and writing about the past serves as an act of resistance against essentialist ideas of black experience shaping the cultural discourse of the present. Byerman demonstrates that these novels disrupt the temptation in American society to engage history only to limit its significance or to crown successful individuals while forgetting the victims.
  contemporary american novelists: You've Got to Read this Ron Hansen, Jim Shepard, 1994 An exciting new anthology of short fiction chosen by thirty-five of this country's most distinguished and popular fiction writers, You've Got to Read This offers readers an unusually intimate glimpse into how accomplished writers experience literature. Here are stories that inspired today's leading novelists and short-story writers to embark on their own writing careers, stories that took their breath away and changed them, or the way they responded to literature, forever. Oscar Hijuelos confesses his debt to the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, whose brilliant story The Aleph inspired him to become a writer himself. Mary Gordon stands in awe of what James Joyce wrought in The Dead, and wonders how writers who come after him can equal it. Robert Coover writes movingly of Angela Carter and her mysterious story Reflections, while Kenneth A. McClane says that Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin literally saved his life. Some of the stories presented here are classics, like Anton Chekhov's Gooseberries, introduced by Eudora Welty, or Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, selected by Sue Miller. Some are less well known, like Lars Gustafsson's Greatness Strikes Where It Pleases, introduced by Charles Baxter, or John Updike's Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car, whose beauty stunned Lorrie Moore. All were critically important to some of our finest contemporary writers - among them Annie Dillard, John Irving, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Russell Banks, Jane Smiley, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff - and their comments about the selections offer fascinating entrances into the stories. For lovers of fiction, You've Got to Read This is a treasure trove, a dazzling collection of stories passionately and imaginatively chosen.--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
  contemporary american novelists: When Katie Met Cassidy Camille Perri, 2018-06-19 A film-ready rom-com about finding love when you least expect it.--Elle My favorite romantic book of recent memory. --Emma Straub The delightful, sexy, queer rom-com of the summer . . . [with] all the makings of a Nora Ephron classic. --Vogue *One of NPR's Best Books of 2018* *One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction in 2018* From the acclaimed author of The Assistants comes another gutsy book about two women who find their lives turned upside down by their unexpected chemistry. When it comes to Cassidy, Katie can't think straight. Katie Daniels, a twenty-eight-year-old Kentucky transplant with a strong set of traditional values, has just been dumped by her fiancé when she finds herself seated across a negotiating table from native New Yorker Cassidy Price, a sexy, self-assured woman wearing a man's suit. At first neither of them knows what to make of the other, but soon their undeniable connection will bring into question everything each of them thought they knew about sex and love. When Katie Met Cassidy is a romantic comedy about gender and sexuality, and the importance of figuring out who we are in order to go after what we truly want. It's also a portrait of a high-drama subculture where barrooms may as well be bedrooms, and loyal friends fill in the spaces absent families leave behind. Katie's glimpse into this wild yet fiercely tightknit community begins to alter not only how she sees the larger world, but also where exactly she fits in.
  contemporary american novelists: Ragtime E.L. Doctorow, 2010-11-17 Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
  contemporary american novelists: Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature Joelle Mann, 2021-06-28 Mixed Media in Contemporary American Literature: Voices Gone Viral investigates the formation and formulation of the contemporary novel through a historical analysis of voice studies and media studies. After situating research through voices of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, this book examines the expressions of a multi-media vocality, examining the interactions among cultural polemics, aesthetic forms, and changing media in the twenty-first century. The novel studies shown here trace the ways in which the viral aesthetics of the contemporary novel move language out of context, recontextualizing human testimony by galvanizing mixed media forms that shape contemporary literature in our age of networks. Through readings of American authors such as Claudia Rankine, David Foster Wallace, Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Joseph O’Neill, Michael Cunningham, and Colum McCann, the book considers how voice acts as a site where identities combine, conform, and are questioned relationally. By listening to and tracing the spoken and unspoken voices of the novel, the author identifies a politics of listening and speaking in our mediated, informational society.
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture Mary C. Foltz, 2020-10-08 Contemporary American Literature and Excremental Culture: American Sh*t analyzes post-1960 scatological novels that utilize representations of human waste to address pressing issues, including pollution of waterways, environmental racism, and militarism. Primarily examining postmodern parody, the book shows the value of aesthetic renderings of sanitary engineering for composting ideologies that fuel a ruinous impact on the world. Drawing on late twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers Norman O. Brown, Frantz Fanon, and Leo Bersani, American Sh*t shows the continued relevance of psychoanalytic interpretations of contemporary fiction for understanding post-45 authors’ engagement with waste. Ultimately, the monograph reveals how novelists Ishmael Reed, Jonathan Franzen, Gloria Naylor, Don DeLillo, and Samuel R. Delany critique subjects who abnegate their status as waste-producing beings and bring readers back to embrace Winner of the 2019 Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award for Literary Criticism of English Language Literature
  contemporary american novelists: Notable American Women Writers Laura M. Nicosia, James F. Nicosia, 2020
  contemporary american novelists: Contemporary American Novelists 1900 1920 Carl Doren, 2021-09-05 Book Excerpt: een largely inarticulate except for his rude songs and ballads; formula and tradition caught him early and in fiction stiffened one of the most picturesque of human beings--a modern Centaur, an American Cossack, a Western picaro--into a stock figure who in a stock costume perpetually sits a bucking broncho, brandishes a six-shooter or swings a lariat, rounds up stampeding cattle, makes fierce war on Mexicans, Indians, and rival outfits, and ardently, humbly woos the ranchman's gentle daughter or the timorous school-ma'am. He still has no Homer, no Gogol, no Fenimore Cooper even, though he invites a master of some sort to take advantage of a thrilling opportunity. The same fate of formula and tradition befell another type multiplied by the local novelists--the bad boy. His career may be said to have begun in New England, with Thomas Bailey Aldrich's reaction from the priggish manikins who infested the older juveniles; but Mark Twain took him up with such mastery that his subsequent habitat has usually Read More
  contemporary american novelists: The Contemporary American Novel in Context Andrew Dix, Brian Jarvis, Paul Jenner, 2011-06-02 Critical introduction to the contemporary american novel focusing on contexts, key texts and criticism.
  contemporary american novelists: Great Short Stories by Contemporary Native American Writers Bob Blaisdell, 2013-09-18 Stories by a wide range of modern authors includes Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa, and John M. Oskison, as well as writers who came to prominence in the decades following World War II.
  contemporary american novelists: Florida Lauren Groff, 2018-06-05 'Magnificent . . . Lauren Groff is a virtuoso' Emily St John Mandel 'A blistering collection . . . lyrical and oblique' Guardian 'Not to be missed . . . deep and dark and resonant' Ann Patchett 'It's beautiful. It's giving me rich, grand nightmares' Observer In these vigorous stories, Lauren Groff brings her electric storytelling to a world in which storms, snakes and sinkholes lurk at the edge of everyday life, but the greater threats are of a human, emotional and psychological nature. Among those navigating it all are a resourceful pair of abandoned sisters; a lonely boy, grown up; a restless, childless couple; a searching, homeless woman; and an unforgettable conflicted wife and mother. Florida is an exploration of the connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury. 'Innovative and terrifyingly relevant. Any one of these stories is a bracing read; together they form a masterpiece' Stylist 'Lushly evocative . . . mesmerising . . . a writer whose turn of phrase can stop you on your tracks' Financial Times
  contemporary american novelists: Quarrel & Quandary Cynthia Ozick, 2011-10-05 In her new collection of essays, Cynthia Ozick, everywhere acclaimed as a critic, novelist, and storyteller, examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. She writes--quarrelsomely--about Crime and Punishment, about William Styron's Sophie's Choice, about the Book of Job. She inquires into the subterranean dispositions and quandaries of Kafka and Henry James. She discusses the difficulties inherent in the translation of great books, whether into film or into another language. She explores what she calls the selfishness of art and courts controversy with her views on The Diary of Anne Frank and its transformation for the stage. Her reflections on the rights of history and the rights of imagination tap a profound concern for truth in regard to the Holocaust. She considers the shifting splendors of New York City, past and present. And she revisits her youth more deeply and with more feeling--and comedy--than ever before, in essays that reveal some of the formative experiences of her life as a writer. Quarrel & Quandary is a literary event and a cause for celebration.
  contemporary american novelists: Too Smart to be Sentimental Sally Barr Ebest, Kathleen H. McInerney, 2008 Through a series of critical and biographical essays, this work offers a feminist literary history of twentieth-century Irish America.