Nathaniel Hawthorne: PoMo or NoPoMo?

The Los Angeles Times‘ great book blog, Jacket Copy, caps off a month of discussion about postmodern literature with a post by blogger Carolyn Kellogg offering an annotated list of “61 essential reads of postmodern literature.”

“Postmodern books have a reputation for being massive tomes, like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest — but then there’s The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which has just 144 pages,” writes Kellogg. “And while postmodern books would, you’d think, have to be published after the modern period — in the 20th or 21st centuries — could postmodernism exist without Tristram Shandy? We think not.”

The list includes attributes such as “the author is a character” and “comments on its own bookishness” and is, most likely, going to generate a certain number of … comments. Kellogg says “while this list owes much to George Ducker and David L. Ulin, you can address all complaints to me.”