Four Contemporary Classics to Outlast our Lifetime Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room is the oldest novel on this list, but it feels just as modern as its peers. It is one of Baldwin’s greatest novels, though mostly overshadowed by his other more famous works If Beale Street Could Talk and his Collected Essays, which include ‘The Fire Next Time’ and ‘Stranger in the Village’. Giovanni’s Room is a small book; it follows the story of a man vacationing in Paris, away from his normal life and wife in America. Totalling 159 pages, this book is slim like a dagger. Giovanni’s Room is a story less about queer love than it is about queer fear, how sufficating and hurtful it can be, this book holds it all. Baldwin’s prose is so searing that it burns away any hesitancy to approach delicate topics of intimacy and pain. It figuratively and literally strips its characters to bare flesh, exposing their vulnerability and studying it under the light. For LGBTQ+ literature, this is a totemic text and is one to be brought forward in queer studies and the queer experience.
Outline by Rachel Cusk Cusk’s 2014 novel, the first in her trilogy, fractionally changed the contemporary conception of fiction. Outline falls into the genre of autofiction, a form characterised by the slight fictionalisation of the author’s life, moulding it into a narrative with a message and optional changes of names and places. The supposed goal of the form was for the writer to distance themselves from their past life, like a Greek catharsis. In 2014, the term ‘autofiction’ began to resurface in mainstream literary discourse, having last majorly surged in the mid-late 90s, New York. The difference now is that Cusk’s novel prescribes to the autofiction standards, replaying a titled version of her life on paper, but without the goal of soothing emotions towards life hitherto. Outline is a look back at the past, not focused on the person you were but on the places you were and what relations and systems filled that place. Cusk perfectly cuts together social realism with personal viewpoints, like Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar merged with George Eliot’s Middlemarch. In the novel Cusk’s avatar is used to craft an excellent social realism, told with clear, clean sentences. 632
