Writing the 9/11 Decade

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