Recent books like Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now, and n+1’s MFA vs NYC have illuminated the institutions that support and constrain contemporary American literature. But this odd and unanticipated historical perspective also makes the novel’s arrival an occasion to wonder about the distinctly white and middle-class political ambitions of literary fiction. The term “literary fiction” usefully describes a set of linked phenomena from the rise of creative writing programs to the changing shape of the market for books.
GEORGE SAUNDERS’S Lincoln in the Bardo, his first novel, offers a surreal and melancholic vision of a presidency in crisis. Its high moral seriousness makes an odd vantage from which to contemplate the grotesquerie of the Trump administration.
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