Temporary Future: The Fiction of David Mitchell

Patrick O'Donnell is Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including The American Novel Now: Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980 (2010), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (2000) and The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Fiction (co-edited with David W. Madden & Justus Nieland, 2011).

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Many Worlds, Real TimeChapter One: A Company of Strangers: ghostwrittenChapter Two: Metropolitan Traumas: number9dreamChapter Three: The Reach of History: Cloud AtlasChapter Four: Timepiece: blackswangreenChapter Five: Minor Histories: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de ZoetChapter Six: The Bone ClocksEpilogue: Toward a Fiction of the FutureIndex

A Temporary Future provides a thought-provoking assessment of the novels—certainly much more than simply the “introduction” that O’Donnell claims it is—and, like any good work of criticism, it makes us eager to return to the novels themselves and read them in light of our new understanding.