This book is the first edited collection to focus on the work of contemporary author Hari Kunzru. It contains major new essays on each of his novels - The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, Gods Without Men, White Tears and Red Pill - as well as his short fiction and non-fiction writings. The collection situates Kunzru's work within current debates regarding postmodernism, postcolonialism, and post-postmodernism, and examines how Kunzru's work is central to major thematic concerns of contemporary writing including whiteness, national identity, Britishness, cosmopolitanism, music, space, memory, art practice, trauma, Brexit, immigration, covid-19, and populist politics. The book engages with current debates regarding the politics of publishing of ethnic writers, examining how Kunzru has managed to shape a career in resistance of narrow labelling where many other writers have struggled to achieve long-term recognition.

Introduction: 'Adding Up to an Unknown': the elusive fictions of Hari Kunzru - Kristian Shaw and Sara Upstone
1 'Walking into Whiteness': The Impressionist and the routes of empire - Churnjeet Mahn
2 'It was the revenge of the uncontrollable world': Transmission and COVID-19' - Lucienne Loh
3 Turning the tide, or turning around in My Revolutions - Maëlle Jeanniard du Dot
4 Subjectivity at its limits: fugitive community in Kunzru's short stories - Peter Ely
5 The fiction of every-era/no-era: Gods Without Men as 'translit' - Bran Nicol
6 'Eyes, ears, head, memory, heart': transglossic rhythms in Memory Palace and Twice Upon a Time - Sara Upstone
7 'The ghost is him': the echoes of racism, non-being and haunting in White Tears - David Hering
8 'Food for the wolves': the rise of the alt-right in Red Pill - Kristian Shaw
9 'In the wake of all that': a conversation with Hari Kunzru - Kristian Shaw

Index

Editors

Kristian Shaw is Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Lincoln

Sara Upstone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Faculty Director of Postgraduate Research at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University