<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but . . .
Review: This book should be my holy grail. Postmodern fiction (however you might define it) is, outside of the occasional (or, admit it, a bit more than occasional) wallow in the speculative fiction ghetto, my literary area of choice. And this anthology contains fairly representative sample of the genre? field? not really an appropriate word here. Whatever. Some of my favorite authors are excerpted here, and the anthology's introduced me to a few that I otherwise might have missed.
That aside, I have an issue or two with this anthology. While I can't quibble with anything that was included (I do have an inexplicable loathing for William Gass, but that's no reason to exclude him), there are a number of omissions that arouse my ire. The omission of Thomas Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson from the Fact Meets Fiction section makes little sense. As does the curious absence of William Gaddis (though he's quite possible difficult to excerpt). David Foster Wallace, though well represented by 'Lyndon,' would also not be out of place in the concluding section of essays about pomo fiction with his excellent study of the intersection of fiction and TV - E Unibus Pluram.
And, while this is asking for more than the editors intended, I hate to see the anthology limited to American pomo fiction. Open things up a bit and you can bring in Italo Calvino, Borges, Haruki Murakami, perhaps Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov.
I'd also have been pleased to see less excerpting of larger works (as was mentioned in another review) and more self-contained texts. And I could quibble qith the arrangement of texts - I'd have preferred this to be chronological, as the categories that the works are broken down into seem more than a little arbitrary.
But all this is beside the point (although, as with top 10 lists, half the fun of anthologies is critiquing the choices and ordering). This is a good collection of excellent literature. Not a bad (though undoubtedly incomplete) into to pomo lit. And, for those with some familiarity, it's nice to have bits of so many great texts in one place.
Rating: 
Summary: good selection, but lacking a few
Review: A great selection in a number of ways, but missing a few major writers. Probably the most significant is Richard Powers, whose Galatea 2.2 is a major work of postmodern fiction. Bruce Sterling as well...and Cryptonomicon is a much more significant postmodern novel than Snow Crash.
Rating: 
Summary: A Text Book On Arts and Culture
Review: This book with it's lucid chapter introductions offers an anthology which could be useful as a textbook for a class on arts and culture in America in the second half of the 20th Century.Also, it is a good read, a nice collection of literature.
Rating:
Summary: From my textbook to my favorite read.
Review: This was one of my assigned texts for an English class I took. At the time I didn't even know what Postmodernism was, but this book changed all that and more. Now I love Postmodernism and have bought and read many of the books from which this collection has exerpts from. From Postmodern theory to classic postmodern stories, this book kept me interested through it all. I love this book and have reread it for fun many times.
Rating:
Summary: Good material but it does not always work
Review: While there are tons of anthologies on Postmodernism in many socio-political-philosophical and critical forms, few seem to focus on the actual literature. This anthology is a step towards fixing this problem. It contains almost every major author and is organized as well as can be expected given the lack of form that postmodernism seems to engender. However, there is a major flaw to this work. It contains mostly excerts from larger works. This makes reading the thing uninspiring. It gives one a good idea about what books one should read to understand postmodernism but I do not think it really contributes much in itself. Having said that, I should say that the Introduction and organizing chapters are much stronger than what one normally finds in an anthology. Also the section on Postmodern theory is much stronger than the fiction sections.
Rating:
Summary: Good material but it does not always work
Review: While there are tons of anthologies on Postmodernism in many socio-political-philosophical and critical forms, few seem to focus on the actual literature. This anthology is a step towards fixing this problem. It contains almost every major author and is organized as well as can be expected given the lack of form that postmodernism seems to engender. However, there is a major flaw to this work. It contains mostly excerts from larger works. This makes reading the thing uninspiring. It gives one a good idea about what books one should read to understand postmodernism but I do not think it really contributes much in itself. Having said that, I should say that the Introduction and organizing chapters are much stronger than what one normally finds in an anthology. Also the section on Postmodern theory is much stronger than the fiction sections.
<< 1 >>
|
