Writing the 9/11 Decade: Reportage and the Evolution of the Novel

Journalist and academic Charlie Lee-Potter traces the evolution of literary journalism by writers such as Ian McEwan, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, and Mohsin Hamid into new fictional approaches to 9/11. Beginning with the sometimes mawkish writing that emerged in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, she assesses novelists' attempts to subsume the disaster, while standing apart from it. Writing the 9/11 Decade includes interviews with novelists such as Richard Ford, Amy Waldman, and Kamila Shamsie, as well as the only long-form interview granted by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, himself 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.