Author: John Brooks
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 451
Book Description
The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility. John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, Brooks pinpoints a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. Brooks contends that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand African American cultural production.
The Racial Unfamiliar
Author: John Brooks
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 451
Book Description
The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility. John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, Brooks pinpoints a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. Brooks contends that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand African American cultural production.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555806
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 451
Book Description
The works of African American authors and artists are too often interpreted through the lens of authenticity. They are scrutinized for “positive” or “negative” representations of Black people and Black culture or are assumed to communicate some truth about Black identity or the “Black experience.” However, many contemporary Black artists are creating works that cannot be slotted into such categories. Their art resists interpretation in terms of conventional racial discourse; instead, they embrace opacity, uncertainty, and illegibility. John Brooks examines a range of abstractionist, experimental, and genre-defying works by Black writers and artists that challenge how audiences perceive and imagine race. He argues that literature and visual art that exceed the confines of familiar conceptions of Black identity can upend received ideas about race and difference. Considering photography by Roy DeCarava, installation art by Kara Walker, novels by Percival Everett and Paul Beatty, drama by Suzan-Lori Parks, and poetry by Robin Coste Lewis, Brooks pinpoints a shared aesthetic sensibility. In their works, the devices that typically make race feel familiar are instead used to estrange cultural assumptions about race. Brooks contends that when artists confound expectations about racial representation, the resulting disorientation reveals the incoherence of racial ideologies. By showing how contemporary literature and art ask audiences to question what they think they know about race, The Racial Unfamiliar offers a new way to understand African American cultural production.
The Racial Mundane
Author: Ju Yon Kim
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479821748
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479821748
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Winner, Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize presented by the New England American Studies Association Across the twentieth century, national controversies involving Asian Americans have drawn attention to such seemingly unremarkable activities as eating rice, greeting customers, and studying for exams. While public debates about Asian Americans have invoked quotidian practices to support inconsistent claims about racial difference, diverse aesthetic projects have tested these claims by experimenting with the relationships among habit, body, and identity. In The Racial Mundane, Ju Yon Kim argues that the ambiguous relationship between behavioral tendencies and the body has sustained paradoxical characterizations of Asian Americans as ideal and impossible Americans. The body’s uncertain attachment to its routine motions promises alternately to materialize racial distinctions and to dissolve them. Kim’s study focuses on works of theater, fiction, and film that explore the interface between racialized bodies and everyday enactments to reveal new and latent affiliations. The various modes of performance developed in these works not only encourage audiences to see habitual behaviors differently, but also reveal the stakes of noticing such behaviors at all. Integrating studies of race, performance, and the everyday, The Racial Mundane invites readers to reflect on how and to what effect perfunctory behaviors become objects of public scrutiny.
Some of My Best Friends Are Black
Author: Tanner Colby
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0143123637
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
An irreverent, yet powerful exploration of race relations by the New York Times-bestselling author of The Chris Farley Show Frank, funny, and incisive, Some of My Best Friends Are Black offers a profoundly honest portrait of race in America. In a book that is part reportage, part history, part social commentary, Tanner Colby explores why the civil rights movement ultimately produced such little true integration in schools, neighborhoods, offices, and churches—the very places where social change needed to unfold. Weaving together the personal, intimate stories of everyday people—black and white—Colby reveals the strange, sordid history of what was supposed to be the end of Jim Crow, but turned out to be more of the same with no name. He shows us how far we have come in our journey to leave mistrust and anger behind—and how far all of us have left to go.
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0143123637
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
An irreverent, yet powerful exploration of race relations by the New York Times-bestselling author of The Chris Farley Show Frank, funny, and incisive, Some of My Best Friends Are Black offers a profoundly honest portrait of race in America. In a book that is part reportage, part history, part social commentary, Tanner Colby explores why the civil rights movement ultimately produced such little true integration in schools, neighborhoods, offices, and churches—the very places where social change needed to unfold. Weaving together the personal, intimate stories of everyday people—black and white—Colby reveals the strange, sordid history of what was supposed to be the end of Jim Crow, but turned out to be more of the same with no name. He shows us how far we have come in our journey to leave mistrust and anger behind—and how far all of us have left to go.
An Unfamiliar America
Author: Ari Helo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000218333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
This collection focuses on conceptions of the unfamiliar from the viewpoint of mainstream American history: aliens, immigrants, ethnic groups, and previously unencountered ideas and ideologies in Trumpian America. The book suggests bringing historical thinking back to the center of American Studies, given that it has been recently challenged by the influential memory studies boom. As much as identity-building appears to be the central concern for much of the current practice in American history writing, it is worth keeping in mind that historical truth may not always directly contribute to one's identity-building. The researcher’s constant quest for truth does not equate to already possessing it. History changes all the time, because it consists of our constant reinterpretation of the past. It is only the past that does not change. This collection aims at keeping these two apart, while scrutinizing a variety of contested topics in American history, from xenophobic attitudes toward eighteenth-century university professors, Apache masculinity, Ku Klux Klan, Tom Waits's lyrics, and the politics of the Trump era.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000218333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221
Book Description
This collection focuses on conceptions of the unfamiliar from the viewpoint of mainstream American history: aliens, immigrants, ethnic groups, and previously unencountered ideas and ideologies in Trumpian America. The book suggests bringing historical thinking back to the center of American Studies, given that it has been recently challenged by the influential memory studies boom. As much as identity-building appears to be the central concern for much of the current practice in American history writing, it is worth keeping in mind that historical truth may not always directly contribute to one's identity-building. The researcher’s constant quest for truth does not equate to already possessing it. History changes all the time, because it consists of our constant reinterpretation of the past. It is only the past that does not change. This collection aims at keeping these two apart, while scrutinizing a variety of contested topics in American history, from xenophobic attitudes toward eighteenth-century university professors, Apache masculinity, Ku Klux Klan, Tom Waits's lyrics, and the politics of the Trump era.
Unfamiliar Fishes
Author: Sarah Vowell
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101486457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
From the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, an examination of Hawaii, the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn. Many think of 1776 as the defining year of American history, when we became a nation devoted to the pursuit of happiness through self- government. In Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell argues that 1898 might be a year just as defining, when, in an orgy of imperialism, the United States annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded first Cuba, then the Philippines, becoming an international superpower practically overnight. Among the developments in these outposts of 1898, Vowell considers the Americanization of Hawaii the most intriguing. From the arrival of New England missionaries in 1820, their goal to Christianize the local heathen, to the coup d'état of the missionaries' sons in 1893, which overthrew the Hawaiian queen, the events leading up to American annexation feature a cast of beguiling, and often appealing or tragic, characters: whalers who fired cannons at the Bible-thumpers denying them their God-given right to whores, an incestuous princess pulled between her new god and her brother-husband, sugar barons, lepers, con men, Theodore Roosevelt, and the last Hawaiian queen, a songwriter whose sentimental ode "Aloha 'Oe" serenaded the first Hawaiian president of the United States during his 2009 inaugural parade. With her trademark smart-alecky insights and reporting, Vowell lights out to discover the off, emblematic, and exceptional history of the fiftieth state, and in so doing finds America, warts and all.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101486457
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174
Book Description
From the author of Lafayette in the Somewhat United States, an examination of Hawaii, the place where Manifest Destiny got a sunburn. Many think of 1776 as the defining year of American history, when we became a nation devoted to the pursuit of happiness through self- government. In Unfamiliar Fishes, Sarah Vowell argues that 1898 might be a year just as defining, when, in an orgy of imperialism, the United States annexed Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam, and invaded first Cuba, then the Philippines, becoming an international superpower practically overnight. Among the developments in these outposts of 1898, Vowell considers the Americanization of Hawaii the most intriguing. From the arrival of New England missionaries in 1820, their goal to Christianize the local heathen, to the coup d'état of the missionaries' sons in 1893, which overthrew the Hawaiian queen, the events leading up to American annexation feature a cast of beguiling, and often appealing or tragic, characters: whalers who fired cannons at the Bible-thumpers denying them their God-given right to whores, an incestuous princess pulled between her new god and her brother-husband, sugar barons, lepers, con men, Theodore Roosevelt, and the last Hawaiian queen, a songwriter whose sentimental ode "Aloha 'Oe" serenaded the first Hawaiian president of the United States during his 2009 inaugural parade. With her trademark smart-alecky insights and reporting, Vowell lights out to discover the off, emblematic, and exceptional history of the fiftieth state, and in so doing finds America, warts and all.
Play from Birth to Twelve
Author: Doris Pronin Fromberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000525201
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 601
Book Description
First published in 1998. Play is pervasive, infusing human activity throughout the life span. In particular, it serves to characterize childhood, the period from birth to age twelve. Within the past twenty years, many additions to the knowledge base on childhood play have been published in popular and scholarly literature. This book assembles and integrates this information, discusses disparate and diverse components, highlights the underlying dynamic processes of play, and provides a forum from which new questions may emerge and new methods of inquiry may develop. The place of new technologies and the future of play in the context of contemporary society also are discussed.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000525201
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 601
Book Description
First published in 1998. Play is pervasive, infusing human activity throughout the life span. In particular, it serves to characterize childhood, the period from birth to age twelve. Within the past twenty years, many additions to the knowledge base on childhood play have been published in popular and scholarly literature. This book assembles and integrates this information, discusses disparate and diverse components, highlights the underlying dynamic processes of play, and provides a forum from which new questions may emerge and new methods of inquiry may develop. The place of new technologies and the future of play in the context of contemporary society also are discussed.
Strange Future
Author: Min Hyoung Song
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Book Description
Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures. Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822387492
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 301
Book Description
Sometime near the start of the 1990s, the future became a place of national decline. The United States had entered a period of great anxiety fueled by the shrinking of the white middle class, the increasingly visible misery of poor urban blacks, and the mass immigration of nonwhites. Perhaps more than any other event marking the passage through these dark years, the 1992 Los Angeles riots have sparked imaginative and critical works reacting to this profound pessimism. Focusing on a wide range of these creative works, Min Hyoung Song shows how the L.A. riots have become a cultural-literary event—an important reference and resource for imagining the social problems plaguing the United States and its possible futures. Song considers works that address the riots and often the traumatic place of the Korean American community within them: the independent documentary Sa-I-Gu (Korean for April 29, the date the riots began), Chang-rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, the commercial film Strange Days, and the experimental drama of Anna Deavere Smith, among many others. He describes how cultural producers have used the riots to examine the narrative of national decline, manipulating language and visual elements, borrowing and refashioning familiar tropes, and, perhaps most significantly, repeatedly turning to metaphors of bodily suffering to convey a sense of an unraveling social fabric. Song argues that these aesthetic experiments offer ways of revisiting the traumas of the past in order to imagine more survivable futures.
The First Strange Place
Author: Beth Bailey
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147672752X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Just as World War I introduced Americans to Europe, making an indelible impression on thousands of farmboys who were changed forever “after they saw Paree,” so World War II was the beginning of America’s encounter with the East – an encounter whose effects are still being felt and absorbed. No single place was more symbolic of this initial encounter than Hawaii, the target of the first unforgettable Japanese attack on American forces, and, as the forward base and staging area for all military operations in the Pacific, the “first strange place” for close to a million soldiers, sailors, and marines on their way to the horrors of war. But as Beth Bailey and David Farber show in this evocative and timely book, Hawaii was also the first strange place on another kind of journey, toward the new American society that began to emerge in the postwar era. Unlike the largely rigid and static social order of prewar America, this was to be a highly mobile and volatile society of mixed racial and cultural influences, one above all in which women and minorities would increasingly demand and receive equal status. With consummate skill and sensitivity, Bailey and Farber show how these unprecedented changes were tested and explored in the highly charged environment of wartime Hawaii. Most of the hundreds of thousands of men and women whom war brought to Hawaii were expecting a Hollywood image of “paradise.” What they found instead was vastly different: a complex crucible in which radically diverse elements – social, racial, sexual – were mingled and transmuted in the heat and strain of war. Drawing on the rich and largely untapped reservoir of documents, diaries, memoirs, and interviews with men and women who were there, the authors vividly recreate the dense, lush, atmosphere of wartime Hawaii – an atmosphere that combined the familiar and exotic in a mixture that prefigured the special strangeness of American society today.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147672752X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334
Book Description
Just as World War I introduced Americans to Europe, making an indelible impression on thousands of farmboys who were changed forever “after they saw Paree,” so World War II was the beginning of America’s encounter with the East – an encounter whose effects are still being felt and absorbed. No single place was more symbolic of this initial encounter than Hawaii, the target of the first unforgettable Japanese attack on American forces, and, as the forward base and staging area for all military operations in the Pacific, the “first strange place” for close to a million soldiers, sailors, and marines on their way to the horrors of war. But as Beth Bailey and David Farber show in this evocative and timely book, Hawaii was also the first strange place on another kind of journey, toward the new American society that began to emerge in the postwar era. Unlike the largely rigid and static social order of prewar America, this was to be a highly mobile and volatile society of mixed racial and cultural influences, one above all in which women and minorities would increasingly demand and receive equal status. With consummate skill and sensitivity, Bailey and Farber show how these unprecedented changes were tested and explored in the highly charged environment of wartime Hawaii. Most of the hundreds of thousands of men and women whom war brought to Hawaii were expecting a Hollywood image of “paradise.” What they found instead was vastly different: a complex crucible in which radically diverse elements – social, racial, sexual – were mingled and transmuted in the heat and strain of war. Drawing on the rich and largely untapped reservoir of documents, diaries, memoirs, and interviews with men and women who were there, the authors vividly recreate the dense, lush, atmosphere of wartime Hawaii – an atmosphere that combined the familiar and exotic in a mixture that prefigured the special strangeness of American society today.
Counselling Supervision in Context
Author: Michael Carroll
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0857022059
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
`The book is written in such a way as to challenge and educate through the use of exercises, scenarios and activities. Something it does rather well.... A well-written, practical and informative publication... of value to supervisees, supervisors and all those involved in counsellor and supervisor training′ - Counselling Psychology Review `This book... argues that the social context is important for the individual client, supervisee and supervisor, as is the context in which the work and supervision are done... it is a clear, well-written and enjoyable book, containing helpful information for both supervisees and supervisors′ - Transformations, The PCSR Journal There is an increasing awareness of the impact of individual factors on therapeutic work, both with clients and with their counsellors in supervision, but the influence of social contexts on this work has been less clearly articulated. This book provides counsellors with practical information about supervising specific types of clients and in specific organizational settings. Part One addresses four essential aspects of the individual - race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, exploring their influence on the therapeutic relationship and the supervision of trainee and experienced counsellors. Part Two assesses the impact of the organizations where counselling takes place - how different kinds of settings affect work with clients and thus the work of supervision. By highlighting context as a potential source of difficulty for the client, the book encourages trainees and supervisors to look beyond the individual and avoid placing the burden of responsibility for problems upon the client.
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0857022059
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
`The book is written in such a way as to challenge and educate through the use of exercises, scenarios and activities. Something it does rather well.... A well-written, practical and informative publication... of value to supervisees, supervisors and all those involved in counsellor and supervisor training′ - Counselling Psychology Review `This book... argues that the social context is important for the individual client, supervisee and supervisor, as is the context in which the work and supervision are done... it is a clear, well-written and enjoyable book, containing helpful information for both supervisees and supervisors′ - Transformations, The PCSR Journal There is an increasing awareness of the impact of individual factors on therapeutic work, both with clients and with their counsellors in supervision, but the influence of social contexts on this work has been less clearly articulated. This book provides counsellors with practical information about supervising specific types of clients and in specific organizational settings. Part One addresses four essential aspects of the individual - race, gender, disability and sexual orientation, exploring their influence on the therapeutic relationship and the supervision of trainee and experienced counsellors. Part Two assesses the impact of the organizations where counselling takes place - how different kinds of settings affect work with clients and thus the work of supervision. By highlighting context as a potential source of difficulty for the client, the book encourages trainees and supervisors to look beyond the individual and avoid placing the burden of responsibility for problems upon the client.
Big Fiction
Author: Dan Sinykin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550065
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
Shortlisted, 2024 SHARP Book History Book Prize, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—and literature itself—transformed. Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction. Big Fiction features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists—including E. L. Doctorow, Judith Krantz, Renata Adler, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick O’Brian, and Walter Mosley—as well as vivid portraits of industry figures. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550065
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Book Description
Shortlisted, 2024 SHARP Book History Book Prize, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—and literature itself—transformed. Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction. Big Fiction features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists—including E. L. Doctorow, Judith Krantz, Renata Adler, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick O’Brian, and Walter Mosley—as well as vivid portraits of industry figures. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.