Endorsements

Hari Kunzru: Critical Perspectives brings together established and emerging critics of contemporary literature to offer the first collection of essays on contemporary author Hari Kunzru. Tracing the beginning of Kunzru's career to the period of 'Asian cool', the book examines why it is that Kunzru has maintained his success and established himself as one of the most important voices in contemporary fiction today. Kunzru, we argue, is a literary shape-shifter whose own expressed interest in performativity has allowed him to reshape his own writing career, creating stylistically diverse and global fictions which make his work essential to understanding the nature of contemporary writing today. The book opens with an extensive critical introduction which examines Kunzru's work as a whole in the context of global identities, and then offers individual essays on each of Kunzru's novels, his short story collection, and his experimental creative non-fiction. These essays extend existing criticism via engagement with the most up-to-date critical frameworks, as well as examining how Kunzru's writing engages with key political and historical ruptures such as Brexit, the covid-19 pandemic, and the election of Donald Trump. As a result of its scope, the book will be the first go-to collection for readers interested to know more about Kunzru's work, but also for a wider range of readers engaged with questions regarding current trends in contemporary literature. The book contains new readings of literary texts of interest to contemporary literature specialists and postgraduate readers, but in a format (one essay per text) accessible to general readers, undergraduate, and A-Level students.