Thursday, September 10, 2020

The 20 best 9/11 books

In 2011 Justin Webb, Pankaj Mishra, and Jason Burke tagged twenty of the best 9/11 books at the Guardian. One of the novels on the list:
Falling Man by Don DeLillo

“It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night.” So begins this slightly self-conscious but ultimately successful attempt to recreate in fiction the horror of the day and the days that followed. Boy, there were some ghastly attempts at 9/11 fiction and some utterly fatuous suggestions that it was somehow too difficult to approach in a novel (do people not write about wars?), but this work overcame all the pitfalls and pratfalls and manages to be heartfelt without too much sentimentality.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Falling Man is among Porochista Khakpour's ten best 9/11 novels.

--Marshal Zeringue