Book cover of Inventions of a Present: The Novel in its Crisis of Globalization

Book description

A novel is an act, an intervention, which, most often, the naive reader takes as a representation. The novel intervenes to modify or correct our conventional notions of a situation and, in the best and most intense cases, to propose a wholly new idea of what constitutes an event or…


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Why read it?

1 author picked Inventions of a Present as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Fredric Jameson (who died in September 2024), was a giant of the literary and cultural landscape. Famous for his work theorising "postmodernism," he was also an insightful critic of contemporary social history and our multimedia world. Inventions of a Present, one of his last books, offers a selection of scintillating essays on topics from across the face of modern cultural production, from Henry James to the TV show The Wire.

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These Blue Mountains by Sarah Loudin Thomas,

A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.

German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…

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