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Kazuo Ishiguro’s most experimental novel, The Unconsoled (1995), features the travails of its narrator-protagonist Ryder, a distinguished concert-pianist visiting an unnamed Central European city sometime in the late twentieth century. The novel foregrounds Ryder’s minor emotions of irritation and anxiety as they are manifested side by side with his semi-amnesia, his cognitive dissonance, and his occasionally altered states of consciousness. But the novel’s epistemological uncertainties, together with its circular formal structure, its temporal instability, and its disconcertingly wild causality, articulate an anxiety in or of narrative itself. And yet, irritation and anxiety do not remain quietly within the framework of narrative form. These affects, firstly, infect the novel’s characters, and secondly, through their affectively contagious quality, its readers, who are often left irritated and anxious by the novel’s seemingly interminable vicissitudes. The Unconsoled suggests that the governing emotions of late modernism are the non-redemptive minor affects of irritation and anxiety.

[...]in her highly publicized book The Death of Truth (2018), former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani made the point that the \"truth decay\" our society has been experiencing for decades (which the Rand Corporation described as the progressively \"diminishing role of facts and analysis\" in American public life) has accelerated in the last few years as a result of the rise of media platforms that are flooded with disinformation. While it is true that the spread of fake information by \"bad actors\" has contributed to the erosion of truth in our media environment, it is also important to recognize that what is new about the current situation is not necessarily the presence of fake or false information in the public sphere, but the speed with which this kind of disinformation travels in the digital age, and the inflationary effect of the siloed media that spreads it like wild fire in our market society (as Egginton and I have argued in Medialogies). Yet, given the scale of the current problems and the stakes we face as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century (the rise of racism, authoritarianism and misogyny, the crisis of democracy around the world, the threat of planetary devastation), these issues take on a renewed urgency today. [...]there seems to be a rapidly building consensus among information professionals, scientists, intellectuals, and educators that the fight against the plague of disinformation and the immobilizing stupor that comes with it is ultimately the fight for the future of humanity.

Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs is a novel about female maturation and familial bonds that can also be read as a complex response to the patriotic discourses of “homeland security” that prevailed after the 9/11 attacks. Moore's contribution to the sub-genre of “9/11 fiction” has been overlooked because her concerns appear to be with the limited sphere of domestic relations. In line with Amy Kaplan's work on the far-reaching implications of the seemingly narrow domestic novel, Moore's novel examines the state of her nation after 9/11 in a context that extends well beyond the home, understood as both domestic and national space.

What's significant is the criticism. In 1998, [Michiko Kakutani] was awarded the Pulitzer for her \"fearless and authoritative\" journalism, and her work has been described as being required reading for literary types. Of all the authors who have bitten back, the most offensive was the late Norman Mailer, who described Kakutani as \"a one-woman kamikaze\" in 2005, and said he didn't know what had \"put the hair up her immortal Japanese ass\". He went on to add that the only reason the Times didn't fire her was because she was \"a twofer\", being \"Asiatic\" and \"feminist\". Why Mailer thought the Times would want to fire someone with the guts to describe one of his

Sources said [Michiko Kakutani] recently decided to stick with The New York Times, her home for the past 25 years, after a serious flirtation with its L.A. rival. L.A.'s No. 2, managing editor Dean Baquet, and deputy managing editor John Montorio, a friend of Kakutani, both came from The New York Times. In the end, The Times, eager to keep Kakutani, whose sharply observed and sometimes cutting reviews often get prominent display, managed to counteract the romance from L.A.

There are endless litanies of meals eaten, speeches delivered, voters greeted and turkeys pardoned. . . The nation's first baby- boomer president always seemed like an avatar of his generation, defined by the struggles of the Sixties and Vietnam, comfortable in the use of touchy-feely language, and intent on demystifying his job. And yet the former president's account of his life, read post- 9/11, feels strangely like an artifact from a distant, more innocent era.

INSECURITY about the literary and commercial value of children's books had faded to black. The Guardian noted fiction for young people -- from Winnie the Pooh to Little Women -- had \"colonised\" a third of the BBC's Big Read shortlist of the nation's favourite books. (Not so the ABC's search for the best-loved Australian book, where those for children were less than 10 per cent). The UK bookie's favourite was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, but C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was second and J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was fifth. It also transpired that the extremely adult novelist, Martin Amis, having once declared he would consider writing for children only if he were \"recovering from a serious head injury\", was in fact writing a kids' book, The Scotsman reported. He said it would be \"nothing with a moral. It's about the things that children say.\" Put simply, writers were after bigger sales, having learnt from the example of J.K. Rowling, Britain's top earning woman with a $300 million income last year from her Harry Potter books. Children's book sales in the UK had risen by 22 per cent in the past five years and publishers worldwide were on the hunt for the next Rowling. New York's Alfred A. Knopf may have hit the jackpot with a home-educated teenager called Christopher Paolini whose Eragon blitzed even Rowling on The New York Times bestseller list this year. And \"kidlit\" had become a broad church indeed, including the burgeoning \"young adult\" category as well as all age groups below it.

A year and a half into the 2000s, it's clear that no single choice, terrible or otherwise, has emerged. These days, writers try to avoid the issue by simply not referring to the decade at all. For instance, in Kakutani's article comparing the 1980s and 2000s, she used the terms \"80's\" and \"1980's\" 10 times, while using \"2000's\" just once. Call this an unresolved issue that we'll have to deal with only for another nine years. Careful readers of the preceding paragraphs - - aren't you all! -- have noticed that, while [Michiko Kakutani] inserted apostrophes in \"2000's\" and \"'00's,\" I didn't. Kakutani's newspaper, the New York Times, quirkily insists on using apostrophes to indicate plural numbers, while most other publications leave out the apostrophes.