This lively new volume of essays examines what happens now in 21st century fiction. Fresh theoretical approaches to writers such as Salman Rushdie, David Peace, Margaret Atwood, and Hilary Mantel, and identifications of 21st-century themes, tropes and styles combine to produce a timely critical intervention into genuinely contemporary fiction.
1. Introduction: What Happens Now; Siân Adiseshiah and Rupert Hildyard 2. Such a Thing as Avant Garde Has Ceased to Exist: The Hidden Legacies of the British Experimental Novel; Jenny Hodgson 3. Tough Shit Erich Auerbach: Contingency and Estrangement in David Peace's Occupied City and Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher ; Phil Redpath 4. When the Two Sevens Clash: David Peace's Nineteen Seventy-Seven as 'Occult History'; Dean Lockwood 5. Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan's Twenty-First-Century Novels; Alice Bennett 6. 'The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross': Stepping Across Lines in Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown ; Daniel O'Gorman 7. 'The Private Rooms and Public Haunts': Theatricality and the City of London in Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White ; Lin Pettersson 8. 'This is my Opa. Do you remember him killing the Jews?': Rachel Seiffert's ' Micha ' and the Transgenerational Haunting of a Silenced Past; María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro 9. A Voice without a Name: Gothic Homelessness in Ali Smith's Hotel World and Trezza Azzopardi's Remember Me ; Emily Horton 10. Ghosts of Postmodernity - Spectral Epistemology and Haunting in Hilary Mantel's Fludd and Beyond Black ; Wolfgang Funk 11. Intimations of Immortality: Semiologies of Ageing and the Lineaments of Eternity in Contemporary Prose; Lucy Perry 12. Crosshatching: Boundary Crossing in the Post-millennial British Boom; Jude Roberts 13. 'You just know when the world is about to break apart': Utopia, Dystopia, and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army ; Iain Robinson 14. Finding the Right Kind of Attention: Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside's Glister; Florian Niedlich Introduction: Glister, Romantic Thought and the Religious Turn Dystopia and Transcendence Conclusion: A Form of Reading
