Bloomsbury Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell, A

Having emerged as one the leading contemporary British writers, David Mitchell is rapidly taking his place amongst British novelists with the gravitas of an Ishiguro or a McEwan. Written for a wide constituency of readers of contemporary literature, A Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell explores Mitchells main concernsincluding those of identity, history, language, imperialism, childhood, the environment, and ethnicityacross the six novels published so far, as well as his protean ability to write in multiple and diverse genres. It places Mitchell in the tradition of Murakami, Sebald, and Rushdiewriters whose works explore narrative in an age of globalization and cosmopolitanism. Patrick ODonnell traces the through-lines of Mitchells work from ghostwritten to The Bone Clocks and, with a chapter on each of the six novels, charts the evolution of Mitchells fictional project. Review "O'Donnell is the first to explore the complete works to date of British novelist David Mitchell. From Mitchell's first novel, ghostwritten, to his most recent release, The Bone Clocks (2014), O'Donnell dedicates a chapter to studying each of the author's six novels in detail .... Referencing theorists such as Jacques Derrida and other authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, and Haruki Murakami, O'Donnell makes a careful and clear argument for Mitchell's project as well as his place in literature... it will appeal most to literature students, academics, and literary critics." --Library Journal About the Author Patrick O'Donnell is Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He has taught at the University of Arizona, West Virginia University (where he was the Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature), and Purdue University (where he was editor of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies). He has also taught at several international universities, including the Université de Bordeaux III in France, the Universität Tübingen and the Universität Stuttgart (as Senior Fulbright Professor) in Germany, and Radboud University Nijmegen (as Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Literature) in the Netherlands. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including The American Novel Now: Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980 (Blackwell, 2010), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Duke University Press, 2000) and The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Fiction (co-edited with David W. Madden & Justus Nieland, Blackwell, 2011).