Multilingual Tito engages in sensitive information transfers from his single-room apartment, while journalist Hollis frets over her start-up magazine's censure of its own promotions, and prescription drug addict Milgrim wonders about the military connections of an enigmatic benefactor. Reprint.

The “cool and scary”(San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer. • spook (spo͞ok) n.: A specter; a ghost. Slang for “intelligence agent.” • country (ˈkən-trē) n.: In the mind or in reality. The World. The United States of America, New Improved Edition. What lies before you. What lies behind. • spook country (spo͞ok ˈkən-trē) n.: The place where we all have landed, few by choice. The place we are learning to live. Hollis Henry is a journalist, on investigative assignment for a magazine called Node, which doesn’t exist yet. Bobby Chombo apparently does exist, as a producer. But in his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. And Hollis Henry has been told to find him... “A devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist.”—The Washington Post Book World

William Gibson, author of the cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer (1984), is one today's most widely read science fiction writers. This companion is meant both for general readers and for scholars interested in Gibson's oeuvre. In addition to providing a literary and cultural context for works ranging from Gibson's first short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" (1977), to his recent, bestselling novel, Zero History (2010), the companion offers commentary on Gibson's subjects, themes, and approaches. It also surveys existing scholarship on Gibson's work in an accessible way and provides an extensive bibliography to facilitate further study of William Gibson's writing, influence, and place in the history of science fiction and in literature as a whole.

This book offers a multidisciplinary approach to locative media, concentrating on specific authors and practitioners whose works exist in print and digital manifestations. The book shapes the discourse for an extensive theorization of locative media works from a narrative perspective. It investigates how different genres ⸺ print novels, fictional and non-fictional locative narratives, locative games, and audio texts ⸺ are affected by locative media practice. Part I examines print manifestations of locative media in William Gibson’s fiction. Part II discusses e-book and audio book locative narrative experimentations, suggesting ways to create and categorize locative texts. Drawing on hypertext theory, Part III views Niantic locative games as an instantiation of locative media storytelling practice that challenges digital narrativity. This study captures a transition from a print-based textuality to a digital locative textuality and culture, and proposes flexible innovative models of interpreting narrative textual forms emerging from the convergence of locative and narrative media. ​

By reading two bodies of literature not normally read together - the outlaw literature and espionage literature - Conor McCarthy shows how these genres represent and critique the longstanding use of legal exclusion as a means of supporting state power. Texts discussed range from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare's history plays, and versions of the Ned Kelly story to contemporary writing by John le Carre, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson.

Contemporary fiction takes on 9/11, interrogating the global expansion of surveillance based on fantasies of US national security. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL Narrating 9/11 challenges the notion that Americans have overcome the national trauma of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The volume responds to issues of war, surveillance, and the expanding security state, including the Bush Administration’s policies on preemptive war, extraordinary rendition, torture abroad, and the suspension of privacy rights and civil liberties at home. Building on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, and Donald Pease, the contributors focus on the ways in which post-9/11 narratives help make visible the fantasies that attempt to justify the ongoing state of exception and American exceptionalism. Narrating 9/11 examines a variety of contemporary narratives as they relate to the cultural construction of the neoliberal nation-state, a role that mediates the possibilities of ethnic and religious identity as well as the ability to imagine terrorism. Touching on some of the mainstays of 9/11 fiction, including Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close and John Updike’s Terrorist, the book expands this particular canon by considering the work of such writers as Jess Walter, William Gibson, Lauren Groff, Ken Kalfus, Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, John le Carré, Laila Halaby, Michael Chabon, and Jarett Kobek. Narrating 9/11 pushes beyond a critical focus on domestic realism, offering chapters that examine speculative and genre fiction, postmodernism, climate change, and the evolving security state, as well as the television series Lost and the film Paradise Now.

This is a major new collection of essays on literary and cultural representations of migration and terrorism, the cultural impact of 9/11, and the subsequent ‘war on terror’. The collection commences with analyses of the relationship between migration and terrorism, which has been the focus of much mainstream political and media debate since the attacks on America in 2001 and the London bombings in 2005, not least because liberal democratic governments in Europe and North America have invoked such attacks to justify the regulation of migration and the criminalisation of ‘minority’ groups. Responding to the consequent erosion of the liberal democratic rights of the individual, leading scholars assess the various ways in which literary texts support and/or interrogate the conflation of narratives of transnational migration and perceived terrorist threats to national security. This crucial debate is furthered by contrasting analyses of the manner in which novelists from the UK, North Africa, the US and Palestine have represented 9/11, exploring the event’s contexts and ramifications. This path-breaking study complicates the simplistic narratives of revenge and wronged innocence commonly used to make sense of the attacks and to justify the US response. Each novel discussed seeks to interrogate and analyse a discourse typically dominated by consent, belligerence and paranoia. Together, the collected essays suggest the value of literature as an effective critical intervention in the very fraught political aftermath of the ‘war on terror’. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.