5 hip writers that students can relate to
As beautiful as the sentences that come out of the brains of people like Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, or William Faulkner are, they are definitely of a different generation of thinkers than you students. You love their work, but you can’t really relate, on a tangible level, to what they say. Right? Or was the first time you read Ulysses the moment when you recognized your own soul inside the fictional framework of a literary character? Yeah right. Gimme a break.
I love Joyce as much as anyone else does. Heck, I’ll take your Joyce, and I’ll raise you a Samuel Beckett. I adore tough modernist literature as much as the next dude, but I’ll admit that I (a twenty-something former English major — I’m not that much older than you, dear student, even though in your eyes I might be ancient) have trouble relating to Estragon on a personal level. We speak a different language now. We are stuck in a post-modern fugue, and the entire landscape of literature has changed.
Luckily, there are many writers that consistently produce masterpiece-level literature and write through a modern lense. These writers talk about things like television, anti-depressants, and the Internet. Finally, someone who speaks our language! While we may not read them (yet) as a part of the canon of literature, these hip writers will one day be the Ezra Pounds of our generation. They are people that you should know and read, and here are 5 of our favorites:
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is a young, brilliant British writer whose 2000 novel White Teeth planted her firmly on our literary map. Her work is characterized by its multicultural, optimistic perspective, and a kind of ecstatic radiant joy in language practically explodes from her pages. She is a multi-racial, multicultural writer whose novels provide a poignant, often hilarious look into the immigrant experience in the English speaking part of the world. She is staggeringly prolific too, having written 3 novels in the course of a decade, and everything she writes is consistently amazing. Read this excerpt from On Beauty and tell me if you’re unimpressed (if you are, you are a liar).
Jonathan Lethem
Jonathan Lethem writes hip novels like Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude, and young people love his work because he talks about things like music, popular culture, and youth culture, and because his novels provides an accurate glimpse into the lives of savvy young urbanites trying to find their place in the world. He’s also really interested in superheros and comics (Fortress of Solitude is about two young people who discover a magical ring that gives them superhero power). No wonder all his novels are getting optioned into movies. Currently, Edward Norton is adapting Motherless Brooklyn into a film, so watching Lethem on the big screen is not far behind.
Lorrie Moore
We love Lorrie Moore. We really, really love Lorrie Moore. And what we really, really, really love about Lorrie Moore are her puns. This woman is the punniest writer that we still take seriously, and some of the most hilarious puns ever inserted into novels come straight from her. Like this one
I loved to say quasi. I was saying it now a lot, instead of sort of, or kind of, and it had become a tic. “I am quasi ready to go,” I would announce. Or, “I’m feeling a bit quasi today.” Murph called me Quasimodo. Or Kami-quasi. Or wild and quasi girl. “Or quasi-something,” I added. What my father really was was not quasi-retired but quasi-drunk.
Basically, she’s hilarious. And her writing really delves into the psychology of being young and confused in the world. Her short stories often focus on the experiences of young single people in large urban environments looking for love, friendship, and a source of meaning in their very modern, yet sad, yet hilarious lives. Teleport yourself to a bookstore and buy something by her if you haven’t already. You’ll thank us later.
Junot Diaz
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was one of the best novels we’ve encountered this decade. What novelist other than Diaz could write so convincingly from the mouth of a virginal, awkward geek like Oscar (who loves science fiction and video games) and still make it read off the page like beautiful poetry? Junot Diaz is one mega-talented writer, and his work is startingly brutal, intelligent, honest, and exquisitely gorgeous. His prose, even when discussing something as un-literary as a woman’s behind from the vantage point of an over-enthusiastic teenage boy, never comes off as less than poetic.
David Foster Wallace
What can we say about the genius David Foster Wallace that hasn’t been stated already? His death was untimely and tragic, and robbed the world without one of the greatest minds of the century. Reading Wallace is like coming face-to-face with your own mortality and human limitations. What he could do with language is no short of miraculous. I suspect that Wallace was put on this earth by extra-terrestrial, more advanced species as a kind of experiment. I won’t go on any further than to say that anything and everything Wallace touched will one day become canonical (and would even argue that it is canonical, seeing as I did read him in college as a part of my curriculum while he was still very much alive). He writes about things of interest to young people, like television, popular culture, tennis, fat people in the Midwest, and even adult entertainment (his coverage of the AVN Awards is both sad and hysterically funny). If we had to convince you to read just one writer on this list, we’d put Wallace first. He’s that good.
