Postmodern Literature: Authors and Books

This section contains an alphabetical listing of postmodern authors along with the books they are most noted for.
These works range from Cyberpunk thrillers to essays on philosophy, but all touch on the postmodern condition.
 
Isaac Asimov - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
I, Robot - Classic short story collection focusing on the interaction of humans and intelligent machines
Foundation - Psychohistorian Hari Sheldon attempts to save mankind with his power to predict the future
 
Margaret Atwood - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
The Handmaid's Tale - Dystopian feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled and forced to give up their offspring
 
J.G. Ballard - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Crash - Controversal novel whose characters have a strange obsession with the "sexuality" of automobile accidents
Empire of the Sun - Auto-biographical novel of a young prisoner of war, made famous by the Steven Spielberg film
 
Jean Baudrillard - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Simulacra and Simulation - Essays on the loss of the "real" when our material and media-obsessed culture is driven by copies of copies
The Consumer Society - Consumption is not only the engine for the global economy, but also of our mass-produced culture
 
T.C. Boyle - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
The Road to Wellville - The founder of Kellogg cereals is portrayed as an unethical doctor capitalizing on the health spa craze
 
Anthony Burgess - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
A Clockwork Orange - A dystopian examination of social conditioning, free will, and post-industrial alienation
 
William S. Burroughs - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Naked Lunch - Classic tale of the ravings of a heroin addict, which made fitting use of the random "cut-up" technique
 
Octavia Butler - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Parable of the Sower - Set in a dystopian future and follows a young woman who feels others' pains as if they were real
 
Douglas Coupland - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Generation X - Novel that popularized the description of a lost generation, "McJobs", and accelerated culture
Microserfs - Fictional story of computer programmers searching for a life, as well as technology's impact on such life
 
Don DeLillo - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Underworld - DeLillo investigates the relationship of the cold war and American culture as twin powers shaping the world
White Noise - Prophetic tale of humanity's self destructive use of technologies that pollute our bodies and minds
 
Jacques Derrida - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Writing and Difference - Collection of landmark essays that define deconstruction and demonstrates its use on Western metaphysics
 
Phillip K. Dick - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - Simulacra focused novel adapted into the classic movie Blade Runner
The Man in the High Castle - America becomes a third-world colony in an ironic alternative flip of post World War II history
Ubik - A metaphysical look at ubiquitous commodification, the afterlife, and the blurring lines between real and unreal
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - A collection of short stories, of which the title piece was adapted into the movie Total Recall
 
Umberto Eco - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Foucault's Pendulum - A literary joke turns a fictional conspiracy theory on the Knights Templar into a real nightmare for its authors
 
Bret Easton Ellis - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
American Psycho - A look at our culture's desensitization to violence via a Wall Street professional and cold blooded killer
The Rules of Attraction - A modern love triangle between self-absorbed, over-priviledged students at a fictional New England college
Less Than Zero - Novel of a generation lost and devoid of feeling, portrayed by a college student binging on sex, drugs, and alcohol
 
William Gibson - All Books By This Author, Links, Biography, Back To Top
Neuromancer - THE novel that defined the genre and terms Cyberspace and Cyberpunk
Pattern Recognition - A global look at today's consumer culture, following a "cool hunter" with an ironic allergy to brand names
All Tomorrow's Parties - An experimental drug allows a homeless man to predict society wrenching "tipping points" through the Net
Idoru - A future society so media-saturated, that humanity is lost and artificial intelligences are adored as idols
 
Joseph Heller - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Catch-22 - Satiric World War II classic that has become synonymous with the paradoxical no-win logic involved in law and govenment
 
Fredric Jameson - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - The authoratative work defining the term postmodernism
 
Kevin Kelly - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top Homepage
Out of Control - Book by the founding editor of Wired examines complexity and the convergence of biology and technology
 
Jack Kerouac - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
On the Road - Semi-autobiographical and generation-defining stream of consciousness, based on spontaneous road trips of Kerouac
 
Raymond Kurzweil - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
The Age of Spiritual Machines - Predictions and implications of computers surpassing, and merging with, the human mind
The Singularity Is Near - Accelerating trends in genetics, nanotechnology and robotics will transform us into unrecognizable heights
 
Ursula K. Le Guin - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
The Left Hand of Darkness - An emissary to a cold new world is faced with the ambiguities of a random and mono-sexual culture
 
Jean-Francois Lyotard - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
The Postmodern Condition - If knowledge is power, what role should government play in our technology and information-driven society
 
Norman Mailer - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
An American Dream - Redefines the "American Dream" as a search for identity against the cancerous banality of the culture
 
Marshall McLuhan - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
The Medium is the Massage - Societies are shaped more by the nature of the media than by the content of the communication
 
Arthur Miller - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Death of a Salesman - Tragedy of the all-American dreamer as a loser in commercial society
The Crucible - Semi-historical play that uses the violence sanctioned against rumors of witchcraft as a parable of McCarthyism
 
Chuck Palahniuk - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Fight Club - Violent and schizophrenic tale of a man and his underground society, full of plot twists, ironies, and anarchy
Survivor - An obedient servant turned media messiah dictates his life story into the flight recorder of a crashing airplane
Choke - A con artist who feigns choking to butter up his marks as saviors learns of his possibly divine parentage
Lullaby - A reporter investigating SIDS and a realtor specializing in haunted houses track down a tribal chant that can kill all who hear
 
Thomas Pynchon - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Gravity's Rainbow - A victim of Pavlovian experiments is able to detect incoming german rockets and their destruction by his arousal
The Crying of Lot 49 - A conspiracy of underground mail distribution comments on pop culture, signs, technology, and entropy
 
Tom Robbins - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - A woman uses her unique mutation to hitchhike across america in this tale of anarchist counterculture
 
Neal Stephenson - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Snow Crash - A balkanized future America in the grips of designer drugs, brain hacking, commercialism, and cyberspace
The Diamond Age - Virtual reality, nanotechnology, and corporate franchises influence a future "internet" that replaces bits with atoms
 
Hunter S. Thompson - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - The drug-fueled chronicles of a journalist's hallucinogenic search for the American Dream
 
Alvin Toffler - All Books By This Author, Biography, Back To Top
Future Shock - The pace of change in technology, society, and economics is far surpassing humanity's ability to cope
The Third Wave - Book that predicted the evolution of the post-industrial age of information, mass-customization, and "prosumers"
 
Kurt Vonnegut - All Books By This Author, Timeline, Biography, Back To Top
A Man without a Country - (NEW) Nearly 8 years since his last book, Vonnegut returns with a collection of recent essays on America
Player Piano - In a world where everything is automated and replaced by machines (even the human mind), can anything be done?
Slaughterhouse-Five - Satiric novel of a man unstuck in time, who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden and the numbing effects of war
Cat's Cradle - Cold War parody in which "Ice-Nine" replaces nuclear weapons as the tool for humanity's self-destruction
Breakfast of Champions - Humorous look at American culture where a car dealer takes fiction for reality and is pushed over the edge
 CafePress - Gifts and Fan Art: 

Postmodern Literature: Top Picks at Amazon.com

Fight Club Choke Blade Runner Ubik Snow Crash Neuromancer JPod The Consumer Society Crash American Psycho The Crying of Lot 49