What is the equivalent of public poetry — verse written at white heat after a momentous event — in literary fiction?
In a blog post about the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, Egyptian critic and novelist Sayed Tonsy Mahmoud turned to literary discussions in France. He proposed the useful term romans d’urgences. These are novels of urgency, emergency and immediacy. Yet, as he suggests, a potential problem with such responsive fiction (which I extend to include the conte, or short story, as well as the novel or roman) is that it simply reacts to current affairs. There is thus the danger of ephemerality.