Retroland: A Reader's Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction
About this ebook
Over the past fifty years, fiction in English has never looked more various. Books bulkier than Victorian three-deckers appear alongside works of minimalist brevity, and experiments with form have produced everything from verse novels to Twitter-thread narratives. This is truly a golden age.
But what unites this kaleidoscopic array of genres and styles?
Celebrated writer and critic Peter Kemp shows how modern writers are obsessed with the past. In a series of engaging and illuminating chapters, Retroland traces this novelistic preoccupation with history, from the imperial and the political to the personal and the literary.
Featuring famous names from across the United Kingdom, United States, and the wider Anglophone world, ranging from Salman Rushdie to Sarah Waters, Toni Morrison to Hilary Mantel, this is a work of remarkable synthesis and clarity—a wonderfully readable and enjoyably opinionated guide to our current literary landscape.
About the author
Peter Kemp is chief fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times. He is the author of books on Muriel Spark and H. G. Wells, editor of The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, and associate editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
