Top ten postmodern books

Stuart Jeffries is a journalist and author. He was for many years on the staff of the Guardian, working as subeditor, TV critic, Friday Review editor and Paris correspondent. He now works as a freelance writer, mostly for the Guardian, Spectator, Financial Times and the London Review of Books.

Jeffries's latest book is Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern.

"[P]ostmodernism," Jeffries writes, is "the slippery successor to modernism which seems to be an expression of neoliberal economics as much as it is an effort to dismantle cultural hierarchies."

At the Guardian he tagged ten top postmodern books. One title on the list:

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

The storm that resulted from this book’s publication typified the clash of civilisations Samuel Huntington would later argue was arising in the aftermath of the cold war. On the one side, a pre-modern Islamic faithful believing in the absolute truth of the Qur’an. On the other, a sophisticated godless novelist apparently betraying his heritage and sneering at the Muslim sanctities. Even if you’re not convinced that The Satanic Verses is postmodern, then you will I hope admit that the episode of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm about the affair is pure po-mo. There Larry produces a Broadway musical called Fatwa! that, before passing through countless veils of irony and pastiche, culminates in Rushdie and Ayatollah Khomeini duetting about their clashing worldviews.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Satanic Verses is among Monique Alice's seven books for readers who love Haruki Murakami, Felicity Capon and Catherine Scott's twenty top famously banned books, Seth Satterlee's top six famously banned books, Diarmaid MacCulloch's five best books about blasphemy, Atul Gawande's favorite books, and Karl O. Knausgaard's top ten angel books.

--Marshal Zeringue