In class today we discussed Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children. This was in my “Literature of 9/11″ course. My students wanted to know why I had begun the course with this book in particular. I think the answer lay partly in this interview where Messud had offered the following: “People have said, Oh, you’ve written a 9/11 novel, but I was trying to write an August 1914 novel. In August 1914, everybody was punting up and down the Thames River and eating strawberries and having picnics, and then, a few months later, they were in uniform and being sent out to the front — an absolute disjunction.” But perhaps I also wanted my students to see themselves in the some of the characters, young folk with a fair sense of entitlement and a fine education, slightly adrift in the big city. And then a catastrophe takes place. The changes that it brings–could they possibly be the same ones that these people had aspired to?

Here is my reading list:

Books:
Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
The 9/11 Commission Report
David Hare, Stuff Happens
Jonathan Safran Foer, Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower
Don DeLillo, Falling Man
Erik Saar, Inside the Wire
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Jonathan Raban, Surveillance

Other texts: Tony Kushner, “Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy”; Slavoj Zizek, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real”; Orhan Pamuk, “The Anger of the Damned”; Salman Rushdie, “Yes, This is About Islam”; Arundhati Roy, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”; Fredric Jameson and Richard Rorty on the attacks of 9/11; Judith Butler, “Explanation and Exoneration”; Tom Junod, “The Falling Man”; Andrew O’Hagan, “Racing Against Reality”; James Wood, “Black Noise”; Ashis Nandy, “The Other 9/11″; Jonathan Raban, “September 11: The Price We’ve Paid”; Martin Amis, “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta”; Pankaj Mishra, “The End of Innocence”; Interrogation Log of Detainee 063 at Guantanamo Bay.

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