Our reading list observes three principles. One, everybody on it is alive -or at least they were in mid-October. Two, everything we read has been published since 1983, the year most of the class of 2005 were born. Three, the writers we’ll study come from all across the English-speaking world.

This is a course in contemporary fiction, one designed to suggest the range, variety, and possibilities of the novel today. I’ve chosen books with some eye to diversity in terms of style, subject, and the place-of-origin of their authors, and that range itself will provide one of our central themes. The syllabus is still a bit in flux, but we will read British, American, and South African writers, along with some representatives of the South Asian diaspora. We’ll read three Nobel laureates (Morrison, Gordimer, and Naipaul) along with the winners of any number of lesser prizes; books funny and grim, deceptively easy and obviously hard, and even a few short stories. (Why be fussy?)

Class format and writing assignments will depend on the size of the class; but expect a mix of lecture and discussion; and somewhere between 15-20 pages of writing.

Tentative reading list:

• Morrison, Beloved
• Roth, The Counterlife
• DeLillo, White Noise
• Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival
• Johnson, Le Divorce
• Coetzee, Disgrace
• Gordimer, The House Gun
• Ozick, The Shawl
• Barker, Regeneration
• Moore, Birds of America
• And two out of three: Ondaatje, The English Patient; McEwan, Enduring Love; and Rushdie, Shame.

For this is a period in where this is no one dominant model as to what a novel should be, but the course isn’t designed to make an argument or add up to anything.