21st Century Fiction

QUIZ

Test your knowledge of some of this millennium’s hottest fiction. All are classics, nothing obscure. And nothing came out before 2007, so it’s all very recent.

Have a go, and you’re in the running to receive a 30-euro (£25 / $40) gift certificate to spend at Amazon; in case of a tie, a name will be drawn. Deadline: HAS passed and the prize won.

ANSWERS: CLICK HERE

Name the novel or short story:

1. This short story, about a futuristic spy venture, was first tweeted for an hour a day over a ten-day period in May 2012.

2. Many of the chapters in this novel relate the experiences of a handful of employees of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois in 1985.

3. A 22-year-old homeless guy, released after doing time for using the internet to solicit sex from an underage girl, now must wear a GPS-anklet that monitors his whereabouts and is relegated to live in a makeshift tent city of the dispossessed.

4. In this short story, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed country, presumably Iraq or Afghanistan, is forced to film the beheadings of people taken hostage by terrorists.

5. Nobel Prize-winning physicist’s dysfunctional personal life and cynical ambition see him pursuing a solar-energy based solution for climate change.

6. Short story in which people rent ‘SG’s’ – lovely ethnic women – to adorn their yards.

7. In this best-selling thriller, a man’s wife suddenly disappears on the morning of their fifth wedding anniversary.

8. The last chapter of this novel ends at a rock concert in the near future, in which people are mostly texting to communicate.

9. In this collection of short stories, a young Dominican-American boy must first deal with his wild-ass older brother’s bullying antics and loose lovers before dealing with the brother’s serious illness in which he proves equally difficult.

10. The main character seems to die at many different times during the book, only to reappear unscathed. Later, she either will or will not be close enough to the Führer to aim a gun at him.