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:
