61 Essential Postmodern Reads

The Jacket Copy blog at the LA Times lists “61 essential postmodern reads.” The list is annotated with helpful icons specifying each book’s particular postmodern characteristics like “plays with language” and “includes historical falsehoods.” A quick scan of the icons reveals certain characteristics that are shared by almost all the books on the list, including “disrupts/plays with form,” and “comments on its own bookishness.” The two books on the list with the most postmodern characteristics—each book is marked with 7 out of the possible 10 icons (not counting the icons for short or long books)—are Steve Erickson's Tours of the Black Clock and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Other books on the list don’t seem particularly postmodern, including Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project, and Michael Herr's Dispatches.