Publications

BOOKS
Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
forthcoming Verso, October 2021

The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing,
Harvard 2009.  (reviews and other press)

The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James,
Princeton 2001.

SELECTED ARTICLES
(many of these have been uploaded to Academia.edu)

“Unspeakable Conventionality: The Perversity of the Kindle”
American Literary History, 2021

“Philip Roth’s Modest Phase”
Post-45, April 2, 2019

“Gigantic Realism: The Rise of the Novel and the Comedy of Scale”
Critical Inquiry, winter 2017

“Everything and Less: Fiction in the Age of Amazon”
Modern Language Quarterly September 2016

“The Novel’s Forking Path: Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island
Public Books, April 1, 2015

“The Institution of Nothing: David Foster Wallace in the Program”
Boundary 2, fall 2014

“Dark Times: On the 21st Century Gothic” (A Review of Victoria Nelson’s Gothicka)
The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Timing”
The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics

“The New Cultural Geology”
Twentieth Century Literature, Fall/Winter 2011 [published August 2012]

“The Posthuman Comedy”
Critical Inquiry, Spring 2012

“The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing”
The Los Angeles Review of Books May, 2011

“The Novel, Mass Culture, Mass Media”
The Cambridge History of the American Novel (2011)

“Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present”
New Literary History Fall 2010

“The Zombie Renaissance”
n+1 no.9 spring 2010

“Understanding Iowa: Flannery O’Connor B.A., M.F.A.”
American Literary History, Summer 2007

“Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture”
Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 2005

“The Program Era: Pluralisms of Postwar American Fiction”
Critical Inquiry, Fall 2005

“Social Geometries: Taking Place in Henry James”
Representations, 68, Autumn 1999, 59-83.

“Making ‘Literature’ of It: Hammett and High Culture”
American Literary History, 9.4, Winter 1997, 702-717.

“Making It Big: Picturing the Radio Age in King Kong”
Critical Inquiry, 22.3, Spring 1996, 415-445.