REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA

21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

21st CENTURY ANGLO-AMERICAN LITERATURE

1. A History of Everything, Including You (sudden fiction) by Jenny Hollowell (United
States)
2. Chickens (microfiction) by Elaine Margarell (United States)
3. A Gentleman's C (microfiction) by Padgett Powell (United States)
4. One Today (poem) by Richard Blanco (United States)
5. We Ate the Children Last (science fiction) by Yann Martel (Canada)
6. The Right Sort (twitter story) by David Stephen Mitchell (United Kingdom)
7. One Night (elegy) by Ann Gray (United Kingdom)

ANGLO-AMERICA
Anglo-America (also referred to as Anglo-Saxon America) most often designates to a region in
the Americas in which English is a main language and British culture and the British Empire
have had significant historical, ethnic, linguistic and cultural impact. Anglo-America is distinct
from Latin America, a region of the Americas where Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese
and French) are prevalent. The term Anglo-America frequently refers specifically to
the United States and Canada, by far the two most populous English-speaking
countries in North America.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS FROM ANGLO-AMERICA

JENNY HOLLOWELL
Jenny Hollowell is an American novelist and short fiction writer, and a partner and executive
producer of music house and record label Ring The Alarm. Her debut novel Everything Lovely,
Effortless, Safe was published in 2010, leading her to be named one of the "best new writers"
by The Daily Beast. Hollowell received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, where
she studied film and photography, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of
Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns Fellow in Fiction and recipient of the Balch Short Story
Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Scheherezade, and the anthology New
Sudden Fiction, and was named a distinguished story by The Best American Short Stories.

PADGETT POWELL (April 25, 1952)

Padgett Powell is an American novelist in the Southern literary tradition. His debut novel, Edisto
(1984), was nominated for the American Book Award and was excerpted in The New Yorker.
Powell has written five more novels including A Woman Named Drown (1987), Edisto Revisited
(1996), a sequel to his debut, Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men (2000), The Interrogative Mood: A
Novel? (2009), and You & Me (2012), his most recent and three collections of short stories. In
addition to The New Yorker, Powell's work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper's, Grand
Street, Oxford American, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications.

RICHARD BLANCO (February 15, 1968)

Richard Blanco was born in Madrid and immigrated to the United States as an infant with his
Cuban-exile family. He was raised in Miami and earned a BS in civil engineering and MFA in
creative writing from Florida International University. Blanco has been a practicing engineer,
writer, and poet since 1991. His collections of poetry include City of a Hundred Fires (1998),
which won the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize; Directions to the Beach of the Dead (2005), winner

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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

of the PEN/American Beyond Margins Award; Looking for the Gulf Motel (2012), winner of the
Thom Gunn Award, the Maine Literary Award, and the Paterson Prize; One Today (2013);
Boston Strong (2013); and How to Love a Country (forthcoming 2019).

YANN MARTEL (June 25, 1963)

Yann Martel is a Spanish-born Canadian author best known for the Man Booker Prize-winning
novel Life of Pi, a number 1 international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has
sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the Bestseller Lists
of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. It was
adapted to the screen and directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars (the most for the event)
including Best Director and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.

DAVID STEPHEN MITCHELL (January 12, 1969)

An English author, he is known for such bestselling novels as number9dream and Cloud Atlas.
The latter work was made into a major motion picture. After completing his education, he taught
English in Japan for eight years and used his savings to finance his early writing career. Both
his early novel, Ghostwritten, and his later work, Cloud Atlas, consist of separate but interrelated
stories.

ANN GRAY (May 4, 1946)

The author of a number of collections including Painting Skin (Fatchance Press, 1995) and The
Man I Was Promised (Headland, 2004), Ann was commended for the National Poetry
Competition 2010 and won the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2014. Her studies for an MA in
Creative writing from the University of Plymouth led to her collection of poems about the sudden
loss of her partner, At The Gate (Headland, 2008). ‘My Blue Hen’ is one of many written since
that publication, which, she says, “prove” she was not finished with those poems.

REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS ANGLO-AMERICA

A HISTORY OF EVERYTHING, INCLUDING YOU

(sudden fiction) by Jenny Hollowell (United States)

A History of Everything, Including You.” by Jenny Hollowell was overall very descriptive, so
descriptive one could imagine everything that she was speaking of. She started this story as a
very broad and simple statement of how Earth started and or created. As the story starts to
blossom one can tell that this story became more personal than the Earth being created. Jenny
starts to open up and goes on explaining what seems to be the most important events of her life
in a metaphorical way. Through descriptive sentences one can feel the emotional connection
she was having toward this writing. Also since Jenny is telling this story in first person
everything seems very personal at this point. Overall I loved this story and how open she seems
to be with her life events, from the beginning of time to the end of her life.

CHICKENS
(microfiction) by Elaine Margarell (United States)

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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

Elaine Magarrell's "Chickens" relies upon the apparently ridiculous in order to raise very serious
questions. Both amusing and troubling by turns, the story introduces such devices as a "chicken
angel" to interrogate the value of religious faith and to raise ethical concerns about eating meat.
It exploits the fine line between probable opposites - such as laughter and sadness, absurdity
and profundity - to ask us to rethink the relationship between dinner and morality.

A GENTLEMAN’S C
(microfiction) by Padgett Powell (United States)

My father, trying to finally graduate from college at sixty-two, came, by curious circumstance, to
be enrolled in an English class I taught, and I was, perhaps, a bit tougher on him than I was on
the others. Hadn’t he been tougher on me than on other people’s kids growing up? I gave him a
hard, honest, low C. About what I felt he’d always given me.

We had a death in the family, and my mother and I traveled to the funeral. My father stayed put
to complete his exams–it was his final term. On the way home we learned that he had received
his grades, which were low enough in the aggregate to prevent him from graduating, and
reading this news on the dowdy sofa inside the front door, he leaned over as if to rest and had a
heart attack and died. For years I had thought that the old man’s passing away would not affect
me, but it did.

ONE TODAY
(poem) by Richard Blanco (United States)

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores,

peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies.
One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story
told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.
My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors,
each one yawning to life, rescendoing into our day:
pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows
begging our praise.

WE ATE THE CHILDREN LAST

(science fiction) by Yann Martel (Canada)
A man dying from intestinal cancer volunteers for an experimental treatment which involves
receiving the transplanted digestive system of a pig. The transplant is successful, but leaves
him with a pig-like penchant for consuming garbage. Considering this an acceptable trade-off for
a medical breakthrough, society initially accepts the widespread adoption of the technique, but
eventually collapses as the transplant recipients' insatiable appetites evolve into cannibalism.

THE RIGHT SORT

(twitter story) by David Stephen Mitchell (United Kingdom)

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REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS AND AUTHORS FROM ASIA, ANGLO-AMERICA, EUROPE, LATIN AMERICA, AND AFRICA
21st Century Literature from the Philippines and the World

The short story The Right Sort, written by David Stephen Mitchell - author of the famous
novel Cloud Atlas - was posted to Twitter in a course of seven days. The story, which consists
of over 280 Tweets, generated some excitement when it first started out. However, later Tweets
received fewer and fewer Retweets and Likes. The idea for the project had come from Mitchell's
publisher and served as means to generate excitement about Mitchell's forthcoming novel The
Bone Clocks. Nevertheless, Mitchell turned the short story into a novel of its own called Slade
House, a year after publishing it on Twitter.

ONE NIGHT
(elegy) by Ann Gray (United Kingdom)
One night you’ll come back and I’ll wake
to see you moving noiselessly in your socks,
you’ll look bewildered, nothing’s quite the same.
You’ll be hunting through the drawers,
wondering where your clothes are.
I won’t move or speak, I’ll try not to breathe…

Carol Ann says: This comes from the Cornwall-based poet Ann Gray’s new collection At The
Gate (Headland, 2008) a powerfully moving sequence of elegies to her partner, who was killed
in a car accident. In this poem, the grief of bereavement re-imagines the lover as a Lazarus
figure, returning from the dead, puzzled and disconcerted at the small changes in the bedroom
and the changing, ongoing lives of the living. The closing question is unbearably poignant,
holding a deeper, tragic meaning beneath its colloquial surface.