Lee Konstantinou – författare

The United States and its allies have left the UN to form the Freedom Coalition, which has conducted serial invasions of intransigent countries and regions, including a rebellious anti-capitalist sector of Northern California (Operation Win the West, all rights reserved). The entire Middle East has become a consumerist Caliphate (a reversion to the Ottoman past), led by the hugely popular Lebanese pop singer, Caliph Fred. After an attack on the al-Aqsa mosque is televised on the Holy Land Channel, the Freedom Coalition and the Caliphate prepare for war against each other. Eliot R. Vanderthorpe, Jr., celebrity heir to the multibillion dollar Omni fortune and debauched party animal, is totally oblivious to the political chaos around him. He has far more serious problems to deal with. His hardcore evangelical Christian dad, founder of the Omni Science Corporation, is breeding red heifers on his Texas cattle ranch in anticipation of the Rapture. His activist girlfriend Sarah and he have broken up after a decade of sporadic dating. Eliot quits school and spends a summer in Europe partying even more mindlessly than usual.But when his exploits are inadvertently broadcast before an international television audience, Eliot's father decides he needs to save the soul of his sinful son. Eliot Sr. forces Jr. to take a job at Omni Science and makes him list his name on the New York Reputations Exchange. The "discipline of the Market," Eliot Sr. believes, will do his son a world of good. Eliot's brief attempt at respectable living quickly unravels. In the classified database of the Total Terror Surveillance System, which Omni Science runs for the Department of Homeland Security, Eliot finds footage of a man who looks exactly like him, a cosmetically-altered Eliot-fan - or someone crazier still. This impostor - Eliot lives in Berkeley, California, which with the rest of the Bay Area has been cut off from the media sphere after the Freedom Coalition invasion. This discovery will send Eliot on a crazy journey ranging from the heart of the occupied San Francisco Bay Area, to the gang-infested Riot Zones of New Jersey, and ultimately to the Holy Land itself.On his quest to discover the true identity of his doppelganger, Eliot will find that his father is right to be breeding red heifers: the End of the World may be more nigh than anyone suspects. His father's former business partners, Eliot learns, are planning to stage the Apocalypse, to which they own the intellectual property rights, live on television unless Eliot and his few remaining friends can stop them.

Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process and briefly went out of print.Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt’s work in light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent social critique. The novel helps us think about our capacity for learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing. Drawing on interviews with DeWitt and other key figures, Konstantinou explores the book’s composition and its history with Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s media empire. He argues that The Last Samurai allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and middlemen that ferried it into the world. What’s ultimately at stake in Ludo’s quest is not only who might make a good father but also how we might fulfill our potential in a world that often seems cruelly designed to thwart that very possibility.

Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process and briefly went out of print.Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt’s work in light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent social critique. The novel helps us think about our capacity for learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing. Drawing on interviews with DeWitt and other key figures, Konstantinou explores the book’s composition and its history with Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s media empire. He argues that The Last Samurai allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and middlemen that ferried it into the world. What’s ultimately at stake in Ludo’s quest is not only who might make a good father but also how we might fulfill our potential in a world that often seems cruelly designed to thwart that very possibility.

Charting a new course in the criticism of postwar fiction, Cool Characters examines the changing status of irony in American cultural and political life from World War II to the present, showing how irony migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the cultural mainstream of the 1980s. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately became a target of recent writers who have sought to create a practice of “postirony” that might move beyond its limitations.As a concept, irony has been theorized from countless angles, but Cool Characters argues that it is best understood as an ethos: an attitude or orientation toward the world, embodied in different character types, articulated via literary style. Lee Konstantinou traces five such types—the hipster, the punk, the believer, the coolhunter, and the occupier—in new interpretations of works by authors including Ralph Ellison, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Dave Eggers, William Gibson, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, and Rachel Kushner.For earlier generations of writers, irony was something vital to be embraced, but beginning most dramatically with David Foster Wallace, dissatisfaction with irony, especially with its alleged tendency to promote cynicism and political passivity, gained force. Postirony—the endpoint in an arc that begins with naive belief, passes through irony, and arrives at a new form of contingent conviction—illuminates the literary environment that has flourished in the United States since the 1990s.

Contributions by Georgiana Banita, Colin Beinecke, Harriet Earle, Ariela Freedman, Liza Futerman, Shawn Gilmore, Sarah Hamblin, Cara Koehler, Lee Konstantinou, Patrick Lawrence, Philip Smith, and Kent WorcesterA carefully curated, wide-ranging edited volume tracing Art Spiegelman’s exceptional trajectory from underground rebellion to mainstream success, Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman reveals his key role in the rise of comics as an art form and of the cartoonist as artist. The collection grapples with Spiegelman’s astonishing versatility, from his irreverent underground strips, influential avant-garde magazine RAW, the expressionist style of the comics classic Maus, the illustrations to the Jazz Age poem "The Wild Party," and his response to the September 11 terrorist attacks to his iconic cover art for the New Yorker, his children’s books, and various cross-media collaborations. The twelve chapters cut across Spiegelman’s career to document continuities and ruptures that the intense focus on Maus has obscured, yielding an array of original readings. Spiegelman’s predilection for collage, improvisation, and the potent protest of silence shows his allegiance to modernist art. His cultural critique and anticapitalist, antimilitary positions shed light on his vocal public persona, while his deft intertextual strategies of mixing media archives, from comics to photography and film, amplify the poignance of his works. Developing new approaches to Spiegelman’s comics—such as the publication history of Maus, the history of immigration and xenophobia, and the cartoonist’s elevation of children’s comics—the collection leaves no doubt that despite the accolades his accessible comics have garnered, we have yet to grasp the full range of Spiegelman’s achievements in the realm of comics and beyond.