Are there recent novels that deserve to be read alongside the great novels of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries? To speak to posterity is of course a different thing than to speak to the present, and we, creatures of the present, cannot of course know what the future will find to have endured. To live in the contemporary moment (which is to say, at any moment) is to live within terms that are at once inescapable and fleeting, but it is perhaps also our responsibility to judge, and to try to sift from what compels because of current preoccupations texts whose ambition or originality address what is ephemeral in forms that will endure. We will read a series of texts that readers of the future might deem masterpieces of the past fifty years. These might include some of the following: Maya Binyam,Hangman; Anna Burns,Milkman; J.M. Coetzee,Disgrace; Alan Hollinghurst,The Swimming-Pool Library; Jackie Kay,Trumpet;Jamaica Kincaid,Lucy; Lydia Millet,How the Dead Dream; Marilynne Robinson,Housekeeping; Ali Smith,Autumn; and Colson Whitehead,The Intuitionist.
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