'The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to
one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the past decade as a response to our contemporary predicament - one that draws on new cultural and technological developments to
challenge established notions of democracy, humanity, and national and global sovereignty. Peter Boxall traces formal and thematic similarities in the novels of contemporary writers including
Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, W. G. Sebald and Philip Roth, as well as David Mitchell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dave Eggers, Ali Smith, Amy
Waldman and Roberto Bola鄚o. In doing so, Boxall maps new territory for scholars, students and interested readers of today's literature by exploring how these authors narrate shared cultural
life in the new century'--
