[taosaur]

Does anyone have recommendations for something contemporary and literary but not dark and despairing? Really the past hundred years is contemporary enough, and darkness in the work is fine, as long as it's good quality writing and not presenting a bleak worldview.

I have plenty of genre (sci-fi) on my plate, and I'm looking for something with a little more meat to it. I'm fond of magical realism: a big fan of Italo Calvino and Jeanette Winterson. I read Murakami's Kafka on the Shore not too long ago, and that was good, but a little more dark and more genre-ish than I'm looking for. Two of my favorite novels are Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and Winterson's Gut Symmetries. I'm a sucker for anything meta-textual or cosmological if it's done well. I liked Palahniuk's Lullaby, but haven't been crazy about anything else of his (and of course he strays pretty far to the dark side). For style, Hemingway is king.

Of course, I'm open to something totally different; whatever I'm looking for, I haven't found it yet :P