Editor’s note: On Thursday 26 November 2020, Dr Jason S Polley took part in the discussion “Ekphrasis City Poetics: Art and Text“, which was part of this year’s One City One Book Hong Kong programme, focusing on Xi Xi and her novel My City specifically. The event was a collaboration with the Hong Kong-based literary journal Cha: An Asian Literary Journal; the discussion was filmed at Bleak House Books and was streamed live online. Other speakers were artist Elizabeth Briel and scholar Dr Antony Huen, moderated by Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho. Here, Jason shares with us the list of books he talked about during the panel discussion. (Photographs of the event by Oliver Farry.)

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67).
Non-periodised postmodernism.

Julio Cortazar’s Hop-scotch (1963).
Choose-your-own-adventure conceit.

Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965).
The cultural puzzle of/around a simple symbol.

William H Gass’ The Tunnel  (1995).
The intrigue and horror—and inescapability—of a historian’s interiority.

Edmund Morris’ Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (1999).
The fictional in the service of the nonfictional.

Gordon Sheppard’s HA! A Self-Murder Mystery (2003).
A biography in Screenplay form with removable postcards, letters, and other cultural detritus.

JJ Abrams & Doug Dorst’s S. (2013).
A text composed of unreliable paratexts; replete with removable cultural detritus.

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Jason S Polley is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature. [Click here to read all entries by JSP.]