Postmodern Literature: Authors and Books

 

Isaac Asimov

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

The Handmaid's Tale - Dystopian feminist's nightmare: women are strictly controlled and forced to give up their offspring

 

J.G. Ballard

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

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

The Road to Wellville - The founder of Kellogg cereals is portrayed as an unethical doctor capitalizing on the health spa craze

 

Anthony Burgess

A Clockwork Orange - A dystopian examination of social conditioning, free will, and post-industrial alienation

 

William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch - Classic tale of the ravings of a heroin addict, which made fitting use of the random "cut-up" technique

 

Octavia Butler

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

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

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

Writing and Difference - Collection of landmark essays that define deconstruction and demonstrates its use on Western metaphysics

 

Phillip K. Dick

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

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

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

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

Catch-22 - Satiric World War II classic that has become synonymous with the paradoxical no-win logic involved in law and govenment

 

Fredric Jameson

Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism - The authoratative work defining the term postmodernism

 

Kevin Kelly

Out of Control - Book by the founding editor of Wired examines complexity and the convergence of biology and technology

 

Jack Kerouac

On the Road - Semi-autobiographical and generation-defining stream of consciousness, based on spontaneous road trips of Kerouac

 

Raymond Kurzweil

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

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

The Postmodern Condition - If knowledge is power, what role should government play in our technology and information-driven society

 

Norman Mailer

An American Dream - Redefines the "American Dream" as a search for identity against the cancerous banality of the culture

 

Marshall McLuhan

The Medium is the Massage - Societies are shaped more by the nature of the media than by the content of the communication

 

Arthur Miller

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

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

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

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - A woman uses her unique mutation to hitchhike across america in this tale of anarchist counterculture

 

Neal Stephenson

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

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - The drug-fueled chronicles of a journalist's hallucinogenic search for the American Dream

 

Alvin Toffler

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

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