This paper explores how the canon of literary texts in the English tradition has been destabilised by the literature of the present – works of fiction and poetry that often privilege voices that were previously marginalised. The canon is not an inventory of masterpieces, but an argumentative process currently being conducted in the institution, one whose stakes is the ability of whose stories to speak for a culture. The paper takes as its starting point postcolonial, feminist, and critical race approaches to examining three interrelated trends in writing today: the rise of counter-narratives that challenge or undermine monologic narratives from the perspective of the silenced; the diversification of institutions, prizes, and publishers that expand who gets to be read; and the formal play that many writers today engage in as they resist the conventions of narrative they've inherited, arguing that conventional form can contain the very hierarchies a counter-narrative seeks to expose and dismantle. The paper suggests that the most important change is not the newness of new subjects in the literature but the reconstruction of literature's formal apparatus of address, narration and closure from scratch.