How does new writing emerge and find readers today? Why does one writer's work become famous while another's remains invisible? Making Literature Now tells the stories of the creators, editors, readers, and critics who make their living by making literature itself come alive. The book shows how various conditions—including gender, education, business dynamics, social networks, money, and the forces of literary tradition—affect the things we can choose, or refuse, to read. Amy Hungerford focuses her discussion on literary bestsellers as well as little-known traditional and digital literature from smaller presses, such as McSweeney's. She deftly matches the particular human stories of the makers with the impersonal structures through which literary reputation is made. Ranging from fine-grained ethnography to polemical argument, this book transforms our sense of how and why new literature appears—and disappears—in contemporary American culture.

Literature Now argues that modern literary history is currently the main site of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies. Via 19 key terms, the book takes stock of recent scholarship and demonstrates how analyses of particular historical phenomena have modified our understanding of crucial notions like archive, book, event, media, objects, style and the senses. The book not only reveals a rich diversity of subjects and approaches but also identifies the most salient traits of literature and literary studies today. Leading literary critics and historians offer thought-provoking arguments as well as authoritative explorations of the key terms of literary studies providing students as well as scholars with a rich resource for exploring theoretical issues from a historically informed perspective.

Introduces the most important terms for understanding literature, past and present. Literature Now argues that modern literary history is currently the main site of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies. Via 19 key terms, the book takes stock of recent scholarship and demonstrates how analyses of particular historical phenomena have modified our understanding of crucial notions like archive, book, event, media, objects, style and the senses. The book not only reveals a rich diversity of subjects and approaches but also identifies the most salient traits of literature and literary studies today. Leading literary critics and historians offer thought-provoking arguments as well as authoritative explorations of the key terms of literary studies providing students as well as scholars with a rich resource for exploring theoretical issues from a historically informed perspective. Key FeaturesOrganised around the key terms used in literary studies today: archive, book, medium, translation, subjects, senses, animals, objects, politics, time, invention, event, generation, period, beauty, mimesis, style, popular and genrePuts literary history at the forefront of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studiesOriginal chapters by leading literary critics, theorists and historians

Latinx Literature Now engages with a diverse collection of works in Latinx literary studies, critical theory, and the philosophy of history, as well as a wide range of Latinx literary texts, in order to offer readers an alternative model of how Latinx literary scholarship and Latinx literary criticism might go about doing their work. It encourages practitioners in the field to reflect on literature and latinidad together as both parallel and intersecting historical-cultural formations, and to assess from that reflection how literary works might uniquely condition and depict latinidad as something other than a fixed, stable category of identity, as instead an ongoing process of becoming, one always capable of promise, but also always vulnerable to risk, threat, precarity and even disappearance: that is, as always more prone to the performative flash of an evanescence than to the ontological solidity of an event.

In recent years American readers have been thrilling to the work of such Indian writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. Now this extravagant and wonderfully discerning anthology unfurls the full diversity of Indian literature from the 1850s to the present, presenting today’s brightest talents in the company of their distinguished forbearers and likely heirs. The thirty-eight authors collected by novelist Amit Chaudhuri write not only in English but also in Hindi, Bengali, and Urdu. They include Rabindranath Tagore, arguably the first international literary celebrity, chronicling the wistful relationship between a village postal inspector and a servant girl, and Bibhuti Bhushan Banerjee, represented by an excerpt from his classic novel about an impoverished Bengali childhood, Pather Panchali. Here, too, are selections from Nirad C. Chaudhuri’s Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, R. K. Narayan’s The English Teacher, and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children alongside a high-spirited nonsense tale, a drily funny account of a pre-Partition Muslim girlhood, and a Bombay policier as gripping as anything by Ed McBain. Never before has so much of the subcontinent’s writing been made available in a single volume.

This book introduces the reader to what is current and relevant in the plethora of good books available for adolescents. Literary experts illustrate how teachers everywhere can help their students become lifelong readers by simply introducing them to great reads—smart, insightful, and engaging books that are specifically written for adolescents.

“Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s Alaska is beautiful and wholly unfamiliar…. A thrilling, arresting debut.” —Gayle Forman, New York Times bestselling author of If I Stay and I Was Here “[A] singular debut. . . . [Hitchcock] weav[es] the alternating voices of four young people into a seamless and continually surprising story of risk, love, redemption, catastrophe, and sacrifice.” —The Wall Street Journal This deeply moving and authentic debut set in 1970s Alaska is for fans of Rainbow Rowell, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Benjamin Alire Saenz. Intertwining stories of love, tragedy, wild luck, and salvation on the edge of America’s Last Frontier introduce a writer of rare talent. Ruth has a secret that she can’t hide forever. Dora wonders if she can ever truly escape where she comes from, even when good luck strikes. Alyce is trying to reconcile her desire to dance, with the life she’s always known on her family’s fishing boat. Hank and his brothers decide it’s safer to run away than to stay home—until one of them ends up in terrible danger. Four very different lives are about to become entangled. This unforgettable William C. Morris Award finalist is about people who try to save each other—and how sometimes, when they least expect it, they succeed. Praise: William C. Morris Finalist Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal Amelia Elizabeth Walden Book Award for Young Adult Fiction Tayshas Reading List—Top 10 List New York Public Library’s Best 50 Books for Teens Chicago Public Library, Best of the Best List Shelf Awareness, Best Children’s & Teen Books of the Year Nominated to the Oklahoma Sequoya Book Award Master List Nominated to the Colorado Blue Spruce Young Adult Book Award “Hitchcock’s debut resonates with the timeless quality of a classic. This is a fascinating character study—a poetic interweaving of rural isolation and coming-of-age.” —John Corey Whaley, award-winning author of Where Things Come Back and Highly Illogical Behavior “As an Alaskan herself, Bonnie Sue Hitchcock is able to bring alive this town, and this group of poor teens and their families that live there.” —Bustle