This critical introduction examines the formal and thematic features common among twenty-first-century writers from around the world.

Peter Boxall is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on modern and contemporary literature, including the recent books Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction (2006), Since Beckett: Contemporary Writing in the Wake of Modernism (2009) and 1001 Books You Must Read before You Die, 5th edition (2012).

Acknowledgements; List of illustrations; Introduction: twenty-first-century fiction; 1. Late culture in the early twenty-first century; 2. Inheriting the past: literature and historical memory in the twenty-first century; 3. The limits of the human; 4. A curious knot: terrorism, radicalism, the avant-garde; 5. Sovereignty, democracy, globalization; Bibliography; Index.