Contemporary Writers

Provides a comprehensive overview of the best writers and works of the current English-speaking literary world.

Britain's most important contemporary authors reflect intelligently and imaginatively on the nature and development of the modern novel.

Writing Across Worlds brings together a selection of interviews with major international writers previously featured in the pages of the magazine. Conducted by a wide constituency of distinguished critics, writers and journalists, the interviews offer a unique insight into the views and work of a remarkable array of acclaimed authors. They also chart a slow but certain cultural shift: those once seen as 'other' have not only won many of the establishment's most revered literary prizes but have also become central figures in contemporary literature, writing across and into all our real and imagined worlds. With an introductory comment by Susheila Nasta, editor of Wasafiri, this collection is essential reading for all those interested in contemporary literature. Authors interviewed include: Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Monica Ali, Amit Chaudhuri, David Dabydeen, Bernadine Evaristo, Maggie Gee, Lorna Goodison, Nadine Gordimer, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Wilson Harris, Keri Hulme, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Jamaica Kincaid, Maxine Hong Kingston, George Lamming, Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Michael Ondaatje, Caryl Phillips, Joan Riley, Salman Rushdie, Nayantara Sahgal, Sam Selvon, Vikram Seth, Zadie Smith, Wole Soyinka, Moyez Vassanji, Marina Warner.

Mexican women writers moved to the forefront of their country's literature in the twentieth century. Among those who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s are Maria Luisa Puga, Silvia Molina, Brianda Domecq, Carmen Boullosa, and Angeles Mastretta. Sharing a range of affinities while maintaining distinctive voices and outlooks, these are the women whom Gabriella de Beer has chosen to profile in Contemporary Mexican Women Writers. De Beer takes a three-part approach to each writer. She opens with an essay that explores the writer's apprenticeship and discusses her major works. Next, she interviews each writer to learn about her background, writing, and view of herself and others. Finally, de Beer offers selections from the writer's work that have not been previously published in English translation. Each section concludes with a complete bibliographic listing of the writer's works and their English translations. These essays, interviews, and selections vividly recreate the experience of being with the writer and sharing her work, hearing her tell about and evaluate herself, and reading the words she has written. The book will be rewarding reading for everyone who enjoys fine writing.

Long before John Barth announced in his famous 1967 essay that late 20th-century fiction was 'The Literature of Exhaustion,' authors have been retelling and recycling stories. Barth was, however, right to identify in postmodern fiction a particular self-consciousness about its belatedness at the end of a long literary tradition. This book traces the move in contemporary women's writing from the self-conscious, ironic parodies of postmodernism to the nostalgic and historical turn of the 21st century. It analyses how contemporary women writers deal with their literary inheritances, offering an illuminating and provocative study of contemporary women writers' re-writings of previous texts and stories. Through close readings of novels by key contemporary women writers including Toni Morrison, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Emma Tennant and Helen Fielding, and of the ITV adaptation, Lost in Austen, Alice Ridout examines the politics of parody and nostalgia, exploring the limitations and possibilities of both in the contexts of feminism and postcolonialism.

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.

This book is a collection of twenty-five outstanding minority writers and a selection of their masterpieces in contemporary China. Most of them have won the Horse Award for national minority literatures in China. China is a country with 56 ethnic groups — like a quilt made with 56 panels, each different but a part of the fabric. Since the founding of new China in 1949, minority writers have been flourishing. The transformation of society that is the result of China’s growth and the worldwide advancement in technology has brought about tremendous changes in the areas inhabited by ethnic minority groups. Their diverse lives in these areas and their unique ideas and feelings have contributed much to their writings. Rooted in their ethnic cultures, these writers have shaped many artistic images with salient ethnic features while presenting their ethnic mentality, lives, and their cultural traditions. Their writings are models of ethnic cultural continuity. When we place their writings into the cultural contexts, many cultural values are highlighted, which otherwise might have been overlooked by the cultural mainstream. Their writings are characterized by plain ecological awareness and truth, goodness, and the beauty of human beings. The advantage of minority literature lies in the fact that it seeks the universality of human beings amid the uniqueness of the minority people. From this book, readers may gain an overview of contemporary Chinese minority writers and the multihued cultures of China.

Ninety-six alphabetically arranged author profiles include biographical information, critical commentary, and illustrations.