Ten years after the success of the 1983 Best of Young British Novelists issue, four judges -- A.S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, bookseller John Mitchinson and Granta editor Bill Buford -- set out to identify twenty more young and promising writers. The list introduced astonishing emerging talents: Alan Hollinghurst, Will Self, Hanif Kureishi, A.L. Kennedy and many more. A widely varied anthology including novel extracts and stories that showcase a generation of writers coming into its own.

Kazuo Ishiguro is one of the finest and most accomplished contemporary writers of his generation. The short story author, television writer and novelist, included twice in Granta's list of Best Young British Writers, has over the past twenty-five years produced a body of work which is just as critically-acclaimed as it is popular with the general public. Like the writings of Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro's work is concerned with creating discursive platforms for issues of class, ethics, ethnicity, nationhood, place, gender and the uses and problems surrounding artistic representation. As a Japanese immigrant who came to Great Britain in 1960, Ishiguro has used his unique position and fine intellectual abilities to contemplate what it means to be British in the contemporary era. This guide traces the main themes throughout Ishiguro's writing whilst it also pays attention to his short stories and writing for television. It includes a new interview with the author, a preface by Haruki Murakami and discussion of James Ivory's adaptation of The Remains of the Day.

Second edition of this guide for students studying contemporary British writing - written by one of the key academics in the field of modern fiction studies.

Contemporary works of art that remodel the canon not only create complex, hybrid and plural products but also alter our perceptions and understanding of their source texts. This is the dual process, referred to in this volume as “refraction”, that the essays collected here set out to discuss and analyse by focusing on the dialectic rapport between postmodernism and the canon. What is sought in many of the essays is a redefinition of postmodernist art and a re-examination of the canon in the light of contemporary epistemology. Given this dual process, this volume will be of value both to everyone interested in contemporary art—particularly fiction, drama and film—and also to readers whose aim it is to promote a better appreciation of canonical British literature.

Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot was also extremely prolific. T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews is a testament to both these aspects of Eliot's work. In it, Jewel Spears Brooker presents the most comprehensive gathering of newspaper and magazine reviews of Eliot's work ever assembled. It includes reviews from both American and British journals. Brooker expands on the major themes of the reviews and shows how the reviews themselves influenced not only Eliot, but also literary history in the twentieth century.