W henever I ask my students to think about defin-ing the contemporary era through turning points, significant events, or punctual moments, the conversation inevitably converges on New York City, September 11, 2001. The event that day was shaped by the globalized flows of communication, transportation, capital, and geopolitical power, and so in turn the shorthand of “9/11” has become the spectacular condensation of those very dynamics. The cultural response to 9/11 was complex and multiform, and the critical commentary on that response is now itself extensive and protean. In literature, statements were expected, and delivered, from the heavyweights: Don DeLillo, John Updike, Martin Amis, Art Spiegelman. Each new novel that addresses 9/11 is tested against whether it has approached making a definitive statement: witness the feverish superlatives that surrounded Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) or Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011). Within ten years, we already have a clear idea of a certain canon of texts that enable familiar debates about the ethics and aesthetics of the representation of the catastrophe, as Kristiaan Versluys’s study Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel exemplifies.

One cannot say quite the same for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that followed as a far from logical consequence of 9/11. No defining literary texts have emerged from the overlapping contexts of the invasion, the Iraqi civil war, or the occupation. Perhaps symptomatically, it isn’t yet clear how we should name, period-