Bookatlas
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The Contemporary Era

Between 1975 and 2000, the novel goes properly global: postmodern play turns fiction self-aware, postcolonial writers answer empire on their own terms, and translation starts moving major work across languages faster than ever before. Six continents' worth of ambition, one shared bet: the canon was never supposed to stay this small.

  1. Cover of White Noise
    White Noise

    Don DeLillo · 1985

    Lvl 6326pp

    DeLillo's supermarket-aisle satire of American consumerism is postmodernism at its funniest and most approachable: start here before the mode gets serious.

  2. Cover of Possession
    Possession

    A. S. Byatt · 1990

    Lvl 7576pp

    Byatt splices a Victorian love affair into a present-day literary mystery: postmodern pastiche that still believes in a good plot.

  3. Cover of Song of Solomon
    Song of Solomon

    Toni Morrison · 1977

    Lvl 6337pp

    Morrison sends a man named Milkman flying backward into his own family's buried history: myth and inheritance, claimed rather than imposed.

  4. Cover of The English Patient
    The English Patient

    Michael Ondaatje · 1992

    Lvl 7302pp

    Ondaatje dissolves identity across an empire's wreckage: a burned man, a ruined villa, and nationality as the least reliable thing about anyone.

  5. Cover of A Fine Balance
    A Fine Balance

    Rohinton Mistry · 1995

    Lvl 4624pp

    Mistry runs four strangers' lives together in India during the Emergency with an epic, unsentimental patience: social realism's global reach, updated.

  6. Cover of The Famished Road
    The Famished Road

    Ben Okri · 1991

    Lvl 8500pp

    Okri's spirit-child narrator moves between the living world and the one just behind it: West African cosmology rebuilding magical realism from its own sources.

  7. Cover of The Emigrants
    The Emigrants

    W. G. Sebald · 1992

    Lvl 7256pp

    Sebald fuses memoir, photograph, and fiction into something with no name yet: translation's golden age producing a genuinely new form.

  8. Cover of Infinite Jest
    Infinite Jest

    David Foster Wallace · 1996

    Lvl 101079pp

    The capstone and the hardest text here: Wallace's thousand-page, footnote-strewn monument to entertainment and addiction is postmodern play pushed to its absolute maximalist limit.