Post-Survival, Peggy?

Atwood, Anne Michaels (I'm still feeling guilty for returning The Winter Vault after reading about 10 pages!), Monica Ali and others talk about the idea of a "national literature" in The Atlantic's Fiction 2009 special issue (why is that page displaying in such an ugly way with Firefox? Hmmm. I usually count on The Atlantic to be aesthetically pleasing, among other things... But I digress!). Atwood talks about the impossibility of placing books into a single category - indeed! And that's one of the reasons (nerd alert) I shelve by publication date!