The final film in the series of production/ direction collaborations of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory features a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. The White Countess, released in 2005, invokes many character-types, plot situations, settings and conflicts developed in his novels, making it a usefully retrospective starting point for this special issue devoted to Ishiguro. As Rebecca Walkowitz argues in her opening essay, it is necessary to pay close attention to Ishiguro's stylistic tendency towards repetition and his thematic privileging of the inauthentic if we are to understand the significance of his work in a new world of global translatability. Both qualities signify the realization in contemporary fiction of Walter Benjamin's observations concerning modern works of art designed for reproducibility (224). The Merchant Ivory film adaptation of The Remains of the Day (1993), as well as Ishiguro's screenplays for The White Countess and Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World (2003), give a further turn to this relation - particularly given the centrality of film to Benjamin's arguments about mechanical reproduction - as the reproduced, translated lives of Ishiguro's fictions make an appearance in the reproducible medium of cinema. Ishiguro's screenplays, including The White Countess, exhibit a curious inauthenticity. Characters, events, settings and themes appear as if dislodged from novels already written. Novelists doubling as screenplay-writers are certainly not uncommon; however, as a writer who seems to have occasionally cannibalized his own earlier material (to invoke fellow novelist/ screenwriter Raymond Chandler's useful term [332]), Ishiguro does not, in fact, produce novels that seem designed for filmability. Instead, the continued, cloned lives of certain components of the novels in his screenplays work to challenge any attribution of aura to their original appearance in those novels. If Ishiguro's works challenge the application of geographic definers like English and British, they nevertheless seem in tune with the genre of globalized, translatable fi etions, as Walkowitz suggests - and this proposition carries over to Alexander Bain's notion of humanitarian crisis fiction, to Bruce Robbins's reading of Never Let Me Go as a welfare state fiction, and to my own reading of Ishiguro's later works as fictions of immaterial labor and class consciousness in the twentieth century. James English and John Frow's recent analysis of the roles of celebrity and prize culture in creating the field of contemporary British fiction stresses the importance of the linkages between canonicity and seriality for this field (English and Frow, Literary 48; English, Economy 197-216). Ishiguro seems particularly suited to study as an exemplum of the contemporary, as English and Frow conceive it. He's a prizewinning writer of subtly serialized fictions, for both print and film formats, but also a creator of celebrity protagonists (Ryder in The Unconsoled, Banks in When We Were Orphans, Jackson in The White Countess) in whom inauthenticity is tied closely to a need to feel known, instantly recognizable, and well-connected, in