Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon's and Bolao's Late Maximalist Fic [Paperback]

What comes after postmodernism in literature?

Hyperbolic Realismengages the contradiction that while it remains impossible to present a full picture of the world, assessing reality from a planetary perspective is now more than ever an ethical obligation for contemporary literature. The book thus examines the hyperbolic forms and features of Thomas Pynchon'sAgainst the Dayand Roberto Bola?o's2666 their discursive and material abundance, excessive fictionality, close intertwining of fantastic and historical genres, narrative doubt and spiraling uncertainty  which are deployed not as an escape from, but a plunge into reality. Faced with a reality in a permanent state of exception, Pynchon and Bola?o react to the excesses and distortions of the modern age with a new poetic and aesthetic paradigm that rejects both the naive illusion of a return to the real and the self-enclosed artificiality of classical postmodern writing: hyperbolic realism.

Sellami's detective work here is just as carefully considered as the authors whom he chooses to recognize as exceptional & As usual, [Sellami's] perspicacity gives new meaning to the notion of the subtle yet sinister simulacra within which we all currently seem to dwell. Critics At Large

[This book] offers rewarding ideas about the ways in which the writers coming along in the wake of postmodernism - or those who have lived through the various stages of postmodern literature, like Pynchon and Bola?o - have both embraced and rejected conventional realism as they work to portray the strangely familiar, yet inherently excessive and uncontainable experiences of life in the Anthropocene. Journal of thel£X