Word: fictionalizes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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JIMMY CARTER With his Revolutionary War book, The Hornet's Nest, Carter became the only President so far to try fiction--and admit it openly...
...interesting things about the present moment in U.S. literary history is that the tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing. The highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, which is why we have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell. And like Chabon, who in addition to writing The Final Solution has edited an anthology of hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tales, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (Vintage; 328 pages). And like Jonathan Lethem, who has just published Men and Cartoons...
...land between popular and literary fiction is fertile, but it can be perilous. Lethem is no stranger to it. He won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn, which is basically a hard-boiled mystery retrofitted with great writing and highfalutin themes. Most of the stories in Men and Cartoons play in the nerdier realms of comic books and science fiction--one revolves around a mysterious aerosol spray that reveals lost belongings and lost lovers; another recounts the sad, seedy later life of a retired comic-book hero named Super Goat Man. But while Chabon builds...
...like to be a young girl who turns into a yellow-eyed, red-clawed monster. Mitchell, who was short-listed for this year's Booker Prize, spins a yarn about a man searching for the knife that killed Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. China Miéville--who, as a science-fiction writer, comes from the gangster side of the equation--chimes in with a gorgeously creepy, almost indescribable story about city streets that turn restless and feral and wrestle one another...
This is literature in mid-transformation, the modernist bleeding into the postmodern and beyond. In his introduction to Astonishing Stories, Chabon calls this new high-low fiction "Trickster literature," and you can almost hear in that label the distant bugle call of a manifesto. And you can almost see the future of literature coming. Looks like it's going to be a page turner...