Customer Reviews

Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

as a novice to postmodern fiction, i was impressed by the scope of the anthology. though there are only short excerpts, it's possible to come away with a greater understanding of this innovative and broad field of literature.

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.

Just for that I'm giving it 4 stars. Had the anthology included at least one HST story or at least a blurb I would have given it 5 stars but so it goes.
On my first style and composition course I was assigned a paper on donald Barthelme's "the school". The name Donald Barthelme didn't tell me much back then (two years ago). I read "the school" and liked it, scratch liked... LOVED it. Few days pass and I'm at the University library and come across a spine design I like. I slide it out of the shelf and it's "Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology." I go through the index and Donald Bartheme's "see the moon?" is one of the first stories listed. Loved "see the moon?" I read the whole introduction, kept on reading and come across pieces by William S Burroughs, Mark Leyner, Jay Cantor, Kurt Vonnegut, Curtis White, Walter Abish and so on and so on. Love it so much I decide to take the book home.
One of my favorite stories on the anthology is David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon" and I was disappointed when, a few days later, I take home one of Foster's other books and it didn't even come close to holding a candle to "Lyndon."
The Norton Anthology basically turned me on to the POMO movement. I even read the more high brow, intelligentzia-oriented "A Casebook of Postmodern Theory" section and loved it. Laurie Anderson's another name that wouln't have touched a nerve were it not for this anthology. I am now infatuated with Laurie Anderson and anything related to Laurie Anderson. A wall in Haifa University's Hecht Art building has a plaque dedicated to Laurie Anderson. Damn right!
So it's missing Hunter S thompson but there's enough HST to go around elsewhere. Besides, Norton couldn't have intentionally left out Hunter S thompson, right?...RIGHT!!!?

This is a decent collection of most of the major postmodern american writers and gives some sense of the scope and players (even if the selections are a little too short in many cases)...However, there are some major omissions, most notably there is no Jonathan Baumbach, who is widely considered one of the top experimental writers along with Coover and Barth and Barthelme, and, even with a section called "Fact and Fiction" Hunter S. Thompson is passed over in favor of far less "post modern" New Journalists such as Capote and Mailer. One can only hope that these glaring omissions are corrected in future editions...

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.