Making Literature Now

Amy Hungerford is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of English at Yale University.

"I value Hungerford's value for readers and, as her reader, I pay it forward: Making Literature Now is worth your attention."—Louise Hill, Los Angeles Review of Books "It's rare for literary criticism to bring news. But Making Literature Now is that decisive book that tells you things you want to know about the circumstances and conditions of writing today, even while it guides you through theoretical issues and conflicts with a friendly and ingenious intelligence. Hungerford's brilliant portraits of editors and writers, behind-the-scenes ethnography, and pointed inquiries make this THE book from which future literary histories will be written."—Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man "Amy Hungerford's Making Literature Now is bold and brilliant. At once coolly analytical and ardently engaged, Hungerford reads and interprets with rigor, precision, and moral passion. Bracing, important, revelatory work."—Priscilla Gilman, author of The Anti-Romantic Child "Part reportage, part book history, part literary criticism, part autobiographical essay, Making Literature Now cuts a thrillingly unpredictable path through the field of contemporary fiction. Few scholars know this terrain as intimately as Amy Hungerford does or can match her appreciation for its minor attractions and hidden heroes."—James F. English, University of Pennsylvania "[T]he real challenge – perhaps the defining challenge of contemporary literary studies – is that we ourselves are part of the field, implicated in its specific regimes of value and prestige. It is a challenge inadequately addressed even by some of the best recent scholarship, but one which Making Literature Now brilliantly brings to the forefront of debate."—David Winters, The Cambridge Quarterly "Amy Hungerford's Making Literature Now will make thought-provoking reading for anyone interested in the politics and paradoxes of the contemporary literary culture industry. "—Rachel Carroll, English: Journal of the English Association "After launching a much-needed conversation about a literary field lately transformed by technology and global capitalism, Making Literature Now ends by urging scholars to recognize the transformations around them and not to relinquish their voices."—Evan Brier, American Literary History Online "Hungerford sees the "social" world and "making" of contemporary literature in a theoretically unique and self-consciously "daunting" way.[She] raises the bar on accounts of how literature is made and how we tell the story of little magazines."––Jeffrey Di Leo, Orbit

• Introduction: Writing from the Rabbit Hole1. Making Literature Now2. McSweeney's and the School of Life3. Reading Novels in the Net4. GPS Historicism5. How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love6. On Not Reading DFWAfterword: Present Tense Archive