Writing the 9/11 decade - Charlie Lee-Potter

Writing the 9/11 Decade investigates the relation of the novel to reportage, and the role of bothin shaping culture, by looking at novelists' journalistic responses to the September 11 attacks.Journalist and academic Charlie Lee-Potter argues that novelists were entrapped by theexpectation that they would provide an immediate non-fiction response to 9/11. Beginning withan examination of the sometimes mawkish writing that emerged in the days after the attacks,Writing the 9/11 Decade traces the evolution of literary journalism - in writers such as IanMcEwan, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Mohsin Hamid and Nadeem Aslam - into new methodsof subsuming the disaster, while attempting to stand apart from it. It includes interviews withnovelists such as Richard Ford, Amy Waldman and Kamila Shamsie, as well as the only longforminterview granted by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, who ishimself a 9/11 survivor.In assessing the novel's capacity to respond to and contain an unimagined traumatic event,Writing the 9/11 Decade stands as a contemporary history of the form.