Cohesively structured and convincingly argued, The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal presents an assembly of individual essays which traverse a wide range of hypercontemporary authors and literary examples, but still work synergistically to demonstrate the evolution of contemporary narrative forms in Portuguese literature, in response to the dynamic historic-social changes of our globalised world. As such, The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal is a highly original and much-needed contribution to the evolving landscape of contemporary Portuguese literary criticism and will undoubtedly inspire a new wave of scholarship in the wake of the many questions and considerations that it poses.

International Journal of Iberian Studies

The unrelenting violence of our time is neither intermittent nor antagonistic to literary form as such – so argue the authors of The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal. Quite the contrary, twenty-first century violence is a process of continuous, indeed accelerating transformation that must be considered a form in its own right. This form distinguishes the work of contemporary Portuguese novelists as “hypercontemporary.' Key to this periodizing gesture is the idea that the very destruction of form rises to the level of a form as it produces a world where geography disappears and any identifiable form becomes precarious. That even the most tenacious forms of nostalgia cannot survive in such a novel demonstrates how, in the present moment, novels and their readers are still reliving a fascistic and colonial past. A truly remarkable collection!

Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Professor of Trinity College, Duke University, USA

Although the adjective 'hypercontemporary' has begun to appear in association with recently published literature, novels in particular, its descriptive value leaves a lot to be desired. A new generation of Portuguese novelists have been cultivating aesthetic practices that may be said to substantiate the term beyond an abstract temporal meaning. The essays gathered in this book by Paulo de Medeiros and Ana Paula Arnaut discuss some of those practices as they introduce readers to a cross-section of novelistic works that take further and, in some cases, radically transform models inherited from late twentieth-century masters of the genre in Portugal, namely José Saramago, António Lobo Antunes and Lídia Jorge. Many of the articles engage with and expand upon a watershed article on the hypercontemporary novel published by Arnaut in 2018. Be it through formal and narrative strategies, for example, explorations in intermediality and intertextuality, or due to the insistence with which novelists confront the many forms of violence ubiquitous in today's world, contributors to the volume offer an illuminating applied introduction to a critical concept that unfolds from article to article resisting fixity. At the same time, they present a focused critical introduction to the Portuguese novel in what transpires of the twentieth-first century. An original and much-needed contribution, the present volume may hopefully encourage further critical reflections on hypercontemporary novels produced in other languages and geo-cultural spaces.

Ana Paula Ferreira, Professor of Portuguese Studies, University of Minnesota, USA

The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal, is an insightful, rich, lucid, thought-provoking, stimulating and a pathbreaking book that explores fictional aesthetics and memory after postmodernism. This is a unique and potentially transformative book that will have wide appeal for scholars and will impact different disciplines. It is a must have book to truly understand the current literary landscape of Portugal.

José N. Ornelas, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA

Through the discussion of the hyper-contemporary period and its impact on literature, this book discusses the contemporary intermedial novel of the Portuguese-speaking world, its themes and aesthetic specificities, and questions canonical views of literature. The Hypercontemporary Novel in Portugal thus represents a landmark in the reflection on the hyper-contemporary novel written in Portuguese, when treatments of the topic are sparse in Portuguese and non-existent in English.

Adriana Martins, Associate Professor of Culture Studies, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal