Extra Credit
Besides what you have to read, are you currently face deep in some fun-reading? Here are some Postmodernist faves of mine.
I'm wrapped up in the "Wheel of Time" series. Thanks, KB! I really need to know how Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World is going to resolve! It's a postmodern blend of fantasy, gritty reality, futuristic dystopia, and folksy love stories. Fabulism is where my postmodern heart is right now...
Last week I finished The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, by James McBride. This is a mash-up of secret lives, secret wells, and generational joy. I'm still not over the ending. Thank you, Monkey Pants. IYKYK.
Last year I read The Water Dancer, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He's a well-known nonfiction writer, but this book is a Postmodernist paella of temporal distortion, historiographic metafiction, hyperreality, and black humor. This has magic, Harriet Tubman, and some of the most beautiful prose I have read.
Another book I recently read, coincidentally similar in setting, is The Underground Railroad, by Colson Whitehead. This one does with the legends surrounding America's Underground Railroad what Quentin Tarantino does with the Manson murders in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's part gritty history, part fabulism, lots of wish-fulfillment, and all terrific.
The last series I read was the Divergent series. This series has loads of postmodernism elements like technoculture, metafiction, fabulation, paranoia/hyperreality, and black humor. Divergent is about a young girl who lives in a dystopia. She lives under the governments control and the faction she was born into. however when she was 16 years old she took her test to see which faction was hers. Thats when everything turned in the simulation test (technoculture and hyperreality) she does a rare things. She qualifies for multiple factions making her a divergent, and illegal. After this the series takes you into a whirlwind of emotions as the main character and other divergents attempting to rebel against the government and make a fair and equal free life.