america

Steve Shaviro reviews Tomorrow Now by Bruce Sterling, a book that (for an eminent cyberpunk novelist) is perhaps too sane and sensible.

Tim Keane on rock'n'roll awakenings and the lyrical existentialism of U2 (St Patrick's Day Special, 2005)

In The American Epic Novel, Gilbert Adair presents a "State-of-the-Empire address" that interrogates the epical form in a time where authors no longer talk of writing "The Great American Novel." As Joseph Tabbi finds, such an exploration goes beyond expanding the canon and presents "a new, compelling context for 'the literary' itself."

Joseph Tabbi reviews the essay collection Simulacrum America.

Walton Muyumba reviews Randall Kenan's massive meditation on race and introduces a new word into the discourse on African American literature: zugenruhe.

Chris Messenger achieves a rare convergence of elite and popular cultural criticism by doing for The Godfather (and its spinoffs) what previous critics have done for Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Chris Messenger reviews Tom LeClair's first novel, Passing Off (1996).

On Amy Elias's view of fabulation in the moment of American corporate power, a postmodern novelistic aesthetic that is consistent with Sir Walter Scott's early nineteenth-century mix of romance and Enlightenment-inspired historiography.

Regarding a monumental work on race, time, and classical music that does not lose sight of individual, localized lives.

A personal account by novelist Joseph McElroy of the WTC crash (that is: a structure of some outside and inside project encompassing one individual).