This new volume of essays on the cultural representation of 9/11 arrives on the heels of three high-profile volumes exploring broadly the same subject area, all released around the tenth anniversary of the attacks: Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 by Peter Morey and Amina Yaquin (2011); After the Fall: American Literature after 9/11 by Richard Gray (2011); and also Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism after 9/11 (2011), another edited collection, compiled by Philip Hammond. These are major publications in a rapidly proliferating body of criticism in this particular area of 9/11 studies, but there is still much to be said about the cultural and literary response to 9/11 and this collection from Victoria Bragard, Chris Dony and Warren Rosenberg has much to offer, particularly in its opening section on comics.

Portraying 9/11 casts a wide net, and the twelve essays here are divided into three main sections: “Comics,” “Literature” and “Performance,” though the latter two might be better described as “Novels” and “Cinema and Theatre.” This wide range in media is part of the collection's stated aim of expanding “on the architecture of memory which, in contrast to the ideal of an objective and stable rendering of history, is dynamic” (5). The three essays in the “Comics” section are particularly valuable and one of the unique aspects of the collection; that two of the editors of the collection (Dony and Braggard) are affiliated to Belgian institutions, enjoying close proximity to a thriving culture of graphic fiction, is undoubtedly of service to the collection. Timothy Krause's opening essay, “Covering 9/11: The New Yorker, Trauma Kitsch, and Popular Memory,” provides an excellent discussion of the New Yorker covers which appeared in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Krause argues that many of these covers, which were “seemingly simple in intention and effect,” when analysed from a retrospective position, “offer up – in fact, invite – politicized readings that are more complex and more disturbing” than initially thought (14).

The second section, on “Literature,” is also valuable and there is a particularly interesting piece by Aaron DeRosa entitled “September 11 and Cold War Nostalgia,” which, taking a unique angle on a theme well explored by David Holloway in 9/11 and the War on Terror (2008), among others, draws a direct line of continuity between the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945 and the 11 September attacks. DeRosa argues that “it is within this trajectory that the reaction to the events of September 11, 2001 must be understood” (58). DeRosa's essay surveys some of the now canonized exemplars of 9/11 fiction: Don DeLillo's Falling Man (2007), Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), and suggests that these texts “extend the public discourse of atomic fear into the literary sphere, articulating the vision of the terrorist attacks as an atomic one” (58). For the most part, the other essays in this section continue to work through familiar issues of trauma and memory in texts such as Falling Man and Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005), though Marc Oxby's piece explores less frequently discussed fiction by David Foster Wallace and William Gibson.

The final section on “Performance,” or cinema and theatre, features two discussions of Paul Greengrass's United 93 (2005), an essay on Batman Begins (2005) and Superman Returns (2006) which links back to one of the “Comics” essays in Section One, and a final essay on the plays of Anne Nelson. This is perhaps the weakest section of the collection, but, as a whole, it remains thematically coherent in its aim to scrutinize the way 9/11 is remembered by cultural output, and the essays work well together. This collection may fall slightly under the radar given the recent high-profile releases in the field, but it is nevertheless well worth a look for those who are interested in the cultural response to 9/11.