I was watching the trailer to Gaspar Noe's new film - Enter the Void and it occured to me that i don't know who the literary equivalents to Noe, Lars von trier et al are. So who is on the cutting edge of literature nowadays? What other new authors are out there?
Depends on what aspects you mean. You happen to have picked two incredible directors who both use ultra-violent content as a basis for exploring human nature...in that regard, I'd go with Elfriede Jelinek, Ryu Murakami, Bret Easton Ellis, Hitomi Kanehara...other people can probably add more. But the 'cutting edge' is a pretty wide-stretching thing...there are people on it who are nothing at all like Von Trier or Noe, just like there are cutting edge directors who are completely unlike either of them. A good place to start is The New Yorker's 20 under 40 list, put out this year--if you read much literary fiction you'll probably have encountered most of them before, but it's still worth a look.
Cheers for that - the New Yorker List looks good. I didn't really want to limit this thread to one genre - but at one point in time you could say people like Burroughs, Ginsberg and so on were pushing the boundaries of fiction as James Joyce and Virginia Woolfe had done earlier... I like Murakami and Ellis - but the other two guys are new to me i'll look them up. Going to have a blast at Xiaolu Guo's "UFO" book. Recently finished Chun Sue's debut novel (bit whiny teenagery but gives a bit of an insight into China's burgeoning youth scene which oft isn't reported in the west).
Most of the folk I read are long dead (white males if I'm frank) so I have no idea about what's going on at the cutting edge. I do think that had David Foster-Wallace stayed with us a little longer he could have produced something extraordinary. Some think he already did. There was a piece in the Suday Times this week about the middle-aged Padgett Powell whose current novel consists solely of questions. Every sentence. How does that grab you?
