Drawing on novels by Nabokov, Wright, Powers, DeLillo, Didion, and others, 'No Accident, Comrade' examines the shaping influence of the Cold War's obsession with chance on post-World War II fictional form.

Presents an examination of American novels and nonfiction texts, published between 1947 and 2005, that looks at the concept of chance and how it was denied in the Soviet Union.

Before 12:01 and After is a collection of science fiction, fantasy, mystery and horror stories by Richard A. Lupoff, collecting the best of his short fiction from his long writing career. It contains the following stories: "Mr. Greene and the Monster" "BOOM!" "Incident in the 14th St. BMT" "After the Dreamtime" "12:01 P.M." "Venus-Ah, Venus!" "With the Evening News" "Saltzman's Madness" "God of the Naked Unicorn" "Nebogipfel at the End of Time" "Mort in Bed" "Stroka Prospekt" "Two Sort-Of Adventures" "Blinky Henderson Again" "The Digital Wristwatch of Philip K. Dick" "Snow Ghosts" "Triptych" "The House on Rue Chartres" "The Doom That Came to Dunwich" "The Woodstock West Killer" "Easy Living" "Dogwalker" "A Funny Thing Happened..."

Vladimir Nabokov, bilingual writer of dazzling masterpieces, is a phenomenon that both resists and requires contextualization. This book challenges the myth of Nabokov as a sole genius who worked in isolation from his surroundings, as it seeks to anchor his work firmly within the historical, cultural, intellectual and political contexts of the turbulent twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov in Context maps the ever-changing sites, people, cultures and ideologies of his itinerant life which shaped the production and reception of his work. Concise and lively essays by leading scholars reveal a complex relationship of mutual influence between Nabokov's work and his environment. Appealing to a wide community of literary scholars this timely companion to Nabokov's writing offers new insights and approaches to one of the most important, and yet most elusive writers of modern literature.

This book examines labour in the age of US hegemony through the art that has grappled with it; and, vice versa, developments in American culture as they have been shaped by work’s transformations over the last century. Describing the complex relations between cultural forms and the work practices, Art, Labour and American Life explores everything from Fordism to feminization, from white-collar ascendency to zero hours precarity, as these things have manifested in painting, performance art, poetry, fiction, philosophy and music. Labour, all but invisible in cultural histories of the period, despite the fact most Americans have spent most of their lives doing it, here receives an urgent re-emphasis, as we witness work’s radical redefinition across the world.

American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 explores the under-recognized complexity and variety of 1950s American literature by focalizing discussions through a series of keywords and formats that encourage readers to draw fresh connections among literary form and concepts, institutions, cultures, and social phenomena important to the decade. The first section draws attention to the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena that were new to the 1950s. The second section demonstrates the range of subject positions important in the 1950s, but still not visible in many accounts of the era. The third section explores key literary schools or movements associated with the decade, and explains how and why they developed at this particular cultural moment. The final section focuses on specific forms or genres that grew to special prominence during the 1950s. Taken together, the chapters in the four sections not only encourage us to rethink familiar texts and figures in new lights, but they also propose new archives for future study of the decade.