Urban Fiction Research Articles

Hanif Kureishi ed. by Susan Alice Fischer

Reviewed by: Hanif Kureishi ed. by Susan Alice Fischer Ruth Maxey (bio) Susan Alice Fischer, editor. Hanif Kureishi. Bloomsbury, 2015. Pp. xvi, 175. £22.99. The British Asian writer Hanif Kureishi is often regarded as a trailblazing figure. For over three decades, he has produced plays, screenplays, short fiction, novels, and essays, frequently breaking taboos and exploring under-represented and marginalized people within British society. Several studies on Kureishi focus on his ambitious response to contemporary realities and his impact on British culture. Commentators have focused particularly on his early, groundbreaking cinematic collaborations—the Stephen Frears directed films, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987)—and his critically acclaimed debut novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). [End Page 157] A number of the contributors to Hanif Kureishi, edited by Susan Alice Fischer—for instance, Fischer, Peter Hitchcock, and Geoff Boucher—emphasize the continuingly political nature of Kureishi's putatively more "personal" and "post-ethnic" writing from the late 1990s onwards (1–2, 37, 100–101). As such, they respond to a particular critical orthodoxy surrounding the work of Kureishi's middle, even late (the author is now in his 60s), period: namely, that his work post-Intimacy (1998), a controversial roman à clef charting infidelity and the breakdown of a relationship, has lost its political edge and become introspective, self-indulgent, and navel-gazing. The need to rescue Kureishi's more recent writing from such a charge becomes a refrain across the collection. And the contributors are right to explore the continuing political engagement of Kureishi's twenty-first-century work, including his post-9/11 and 7/7 non-fiction, discussed in Fischer's essay, "Hanif Kureishi's 'better philosophy'" (Chapter 5), and his screenplay Venus (2006), discussed in Deanna Kamiel's essay, "'I believe my eyes'" (Chapter 2). Kamiel accurately notes that Venus, directed by Kureishi's long-term collaborator Roger Michell, gives a voice to young, working-class, white British women—a group often derided as "chavs" and "mingers" by British society at large and without recourse to the protections afforded by multiculturalism and political correctness (32). According to Kamiel, the screenplay's subversiveness arises from placing Jessie, a representative of such socially disregarded women, center stage as the object of desire and focusing on her elderly white admirer, Maurice, and thus on the indignities of aging in a contemporary world obsessed with youth. Connected to this idea of growing old, Jago Morrison's essay "The parallax of aging" (Chapter 6), examines the politics of Kureishi's sci-fi novella The Body (2002) and offers a new reading of this under-examined text in relation to seeing and voyeurism while engaging directly with the theories of Slavoj Žižek. Morrison's nuanced treatment of the politics of aging in Kureishi's recent writing makes this a valuable and timely contribution. Following Fischer's introduction, Michael Perfect's chapter "The enigma of abandonment" argues against interpretations of Kureishi's writing as "representative" of any category within identity politics. His essay usefully ranges across the author's work from the novel The Black Album (1995) onwards, with some fine close readings of the 2003 screenplay The Mother about an older white woman's need for sexual fulfilment. Kamiel's elegantly written essay, mentioned above, follows, reading the much-discussed My Beautiful Laundrette against Venus. Her stimulating contribution accomplishes this comparative reading with style and verve. Hitchcock's "Culture and anarchy in Thatcher's London" (Chapter 3) revisits the turbulent politics of Sammy [End Page 158] and Rosie Get Laid. In Chapter 4, Ryan Trimm finds new things to say about the oft-researched Buddha of Suburbia by exploring it as a rewriting of "metropolitan multicultural novels," that is, the post-Windrush urban fiction of such figures as Sam Selvon and George Lamming (60). In Chapter 5, Fischer considers religion versus capitalism and Kureishi's positing of a "better philosophy" or a third way, provided through art and love. Her analysis of The Black Album alongside more recent post-9/11 non-fiction is helpful and necessary since Kureishi's second novel examines Muslim radicalisation, but she could take up a stronger final position on the more...

Native rhythms in the city: embodied refusal among Uyghur male migrants in Ürümchi

ABSTRACTOver the past two decades, state-directed Han settlement and capitalist development in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia have uprooted thousands of Uyghurs, causing them to move to the city. In this article, I explore how low-income male Uyghur migrants and Uyghur culture producers build a durable existence despite these challenges. Based on analysis of migrant responses to the Uyghur-language urban fiction and indigenous music as well as ethnographic observations of Uyghur migrants from Southern Xinjiang, I argue that indigenous knowledge provides underemployed male Uyghurs a means to refuse the alienating effects of settler colonialism and economic development. By broadening the scope of what counts as ‘resistance’ to Chinese attempts to eliminate aspects of Uyghur society, I show that ‘refusal’ can be a generative way of embodying sovereignty, particularly when confronted by structural violence.

Researching the city and walking with street dwellers: Recreating urban encounters past and present

The art of recreating cities imaginatively and the critical act of reading urban fiction involve processes of research and learning that often include encounters with specific cities and their dwellers, prompting reflection on the forms and ethics of such encounters. Whether carrying out historical research into the past or observation of the rapid transformation of contemporary cities, writers and critics often combine the acquisition of documentary and experiential knowledge of urban spaces. Taking two different categories of writing by Simone Lazaroo, on the one hand her texts on past relations between Singapore and Australia, and on the other her current stories on global cities after the Great Financial Crisis, we explore the processes of learning before and through representation, and the ethics of human interaction in the contact zone of the global urban where, increasingly, the world’s expelled have become street-dwellers.

Writing ruination and control in New York City: Ernesto Quiñonez’s Chango’s Fire and José Rivera’s Marisol

This essay demonstrates the connection between the processes of “ruination” (a term I borrow from Ann Stoler to explain deliberate abandonment and destruction in contemporary urban spaces) and the surveillance/control of bodies (particularly everyday forms of control by nonstate actors) and argues that the necropolitical strategies of ruination and control are important lenses through which to read Latinx urban fiction (I use “Latinx,” now an increasingly common term in popular media and academic and activist contexts that is inclusive of gender identities beyond the binary Latina/o. I use “Latina” and “Latino” when the gender needs to be specified as female or male). Focusing on Jose Rivera’s 1992 play Marisol and Ernesto Quinonez’s (2004) novel Chango’s Fire, I show how imaginative writing reveals the everyday workings and psychic effects of urban necropolitics. Through particular narrative strategies and aesthetic choices, as well as exploration of the effects of ruination and control on Latinx lives and identities, Rivera and Quinonez’s works contribute to our understanding of urban processes, as well as serving as a reclamation of place, by turning on their heads ideas about racialized space as worthless, “dead,” or ripe for conquest.

The Female Spirit

The Female Spirit Diane Goodman (bio) Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China Frank Stewart, Series Editor; Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, Guest Editors University of Hawaii Press www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9738-9780824872878.aspx 200Pages; Print, $20.00 Red Peonies: Two Novellas of China is the first English translation of The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang by Chinese writer Zhang Yihe. Translated by Guest Editors Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, the novellas in this issue of Manoa (28:2, 2016) also features the artwork of Xing Danwen from her series Sleep Walking (2001), disCONNECTION (2002–2003), Duplication Series (2003) and Urban Fiction (2004–2008). As Gernant and Zeping explain in the Editor’s Notes, Zhang Yihe was 28 years old when she was convicted in 1970 as a counterrevolutionary and sentenced to 20 years in a labor prison. Her conviction was partly motivated by her father’s rightist political activities that angered Mao Zedong, and an entry in her own diary that offended Mao’s very powerful wife. Prior to her incarceration, Zhang was a student in the Literature Department at the Chinese Opera Academy; released 10 years into her sentence at the age of 38, she returned to academics, where she eventually became a professor in the graduate school of the Opera Academy in Beijing. Over the course of her scholarly career, Zhang published several histories (two of which are banned in China), and taught and advised graduate students. She retired in 2001 and began to write fiction. The novellas, The Woman Liu and The Woman Yang, are, respectively, the stories of Liu Yueying and Yang Fenfang, two women whom Zhang met while she was in prison. Although certainly each story contains fictionalized versions of real life events, in addition to incidents and perhaps even characters possibly entirely invented, both novellas clearly contain actual people and true circumstances so that the general impression of Red Peonies is more fact than fiction. Gernant and Zeping excerpt a comment from an interview where Zhang was asked about possible contradictions between writing history and writing literature: I simply tell stories. I never consider whether they’re literature or history. Because I don’t even think about this issue, I don’t see any ‘contradiction between literary expression and historical reality.’ [End Page 27] Both novellas no doubt move in and out of both genres. The Woman Liu, possibly because it takes place almost entirely in M Prison where Zhang Yuhe (a thinly disguised version of Zhang Yihe), tells other prisoners’s stories does seem more like historical reporting. The Woman Yang, on the other hand, with its third person omniscient narrator and opening pre-prison chapters, does seem to pay more attention to the craft and devices of fiction and, thus, seems more like “literary expression.” Still, both novellas powerfully and tenderly tell the stories of Chinese women, both in and out of prison, struggling during the Cultural Revolution. Nearly all of The Woman Liu takes place in M prison where Zhang is known as an “expert writer” and as such is charged with helping fellow prisoners write their summaries, the mandatory end-of-the-year report of their efforts to reform. It is through this charge that Zhang learns the story of Liu’s crime and the heartbreak of its aftermath. Although Liu, Yang, Zhang and other characters appear in both novellas, The Woman Yang begins in the civilian world and chronicles a great deal of the young Yang’s life before she arrives at M prison where, ultimately, Zhang offers to write her summary. Prominent in both prisoners’s stories is the cultural and personal, literal and figurative, significance of food and of hunger—physical and emotional. Right at the start of The Woman Liu, narrator/fellow prisoner Zhang Yuhe explains, If you asked what made the biggest impact on me here, I would answer with one word: hunger…As time passed, people grew so confused that they felt they would soon stop breathing, and they wished someone would come over and strangle them. Simply to end the hunger. Of course the hunger is actual and real, the portions rarely large enough to...

Review: Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy, by Tessa Morrison

Tessa Morrison Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing Their Architecture and Political Philosophy Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2015, 262 pp., 30 color and 55 b/w illus. $124.95, ISBN 9781472452658 In 2008, Austrian architect, theorist, and scholar Gunther Feuerstein published a volume titled Urban Fiction: Strolling through Ideal Cities from Antiquity to the Present Day .1 The book combined visual evidence from historical illustrations and written evidence into a series of playful descriptions of what it might be like to wander through unbuilt places of utopian imagination. By rendering these fictional cities in a fictional fashion, Feuerstein adopted a unique strategy to avoid one of the problems that has long haunted would-be scholars of utopian architecture: how to subject the buildings of literature to the formal and historical analyses that are the tools of architectural historians. This problem has encouraged past historians to concentrate on ideal cities that have been visually rendered in some capacity, as with Ruth Eaton's copiously illustrated Ideal Cities: Utopia and the (Un)Built Environment (2002) and Helen Rosenau's narrower but more rigorous The Ideal City: Its Architectural Evolution (1972).2 One of the issues with utopian images, however, is that they often suffer from a lack of fidelity to the texts they are meant to illustrate, perhaps most famously in the case of Thomas More's germinal Utopia (1516), early editions of which featured a frontispiece depicting conventionalized representations of Renaissance cities bearing almost no likeness to the Utopian towns described in the book. Tessa Morrison attempts to tackle both the methodological problem of formally analyzing written architecture and the analytical problem of reconciling illustrations with texts in her new book, Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900 . She does so by creating digital models for ten ideal cities (four from the Renaissance and six from the age of industry), all of which, she …

The ocean and the urban: Poe's “The Oblong Box”

ABSTRACTAt the end of Poe's oceanic tale “The Oblong Box,” the narrator makes the surprising confession that despite having solved the mystery of what lay inside the mysterious “box,” he rarely “sleeps soundly at night.” Given Poe's propensity for narrating the return of bodies, why might the loss, rather than the return, of a coffin evoke horror from the narrator in this tale at sea? This essay considers the ways that oceanic and urban spaces were constructed as interrelated and codependent, though contrasted, in antebellum literature. As opposed to the city, a space of surfaces and solidified forms, the ocean's fluidity presents a limitless depth, unable to be contained by figures like the city streets and solid geometric forms found in the true crime reporting of antebellum New York and imagined throughout Poe's urban detective fictions. The essay reads Poe's oceanic tale “The Oblong Box” in relation to conventions of detective and gothic fiction and with influence from studies of oceanic and spatial studies of literature before finally turning to city-mysteries to show how the ocean becomes a projected space of depth that refuses mapping in antebellum fiction. This prompts us to explore urban fiction in relation to oceanic space, a developing turn in American literary studies. Specifically, questions of surface and depth open up conversations regarding the epistemological problems of the ocean in an antebellum print world that was already struggling to map and contain the growing spaces of urban locales like Poe's New York and Philadelphia. In a telling inversion of the gothic notions of surface and depth, Poe's narrator discovers that at sea, looking below the surface serves to obfuscate and swallow meaning rather than to reveal it.

<em>Adolescent African American Girls as Engaged Readers: Challenging Stereotypical Images of Black Womanhood through Urban Fiction</em>

INTRODUCTIONWhile employed previously as a middle school teacher, this author struggled to build connections between the interests of many of the adolescent African American girls and the compulsory classroom texts reflected within the curriculum. Some of the African American female students were largely disengaged from in-class readings. Relatedly, they also considered themselves, on balance, poor readers, incapable of comprehending the meaning of what they would dismissively characterize as real books, or texts promoted in class. Yet, they were reading urban fiction. In hopes of both fostering more meaningful classroom engagement on in-class texts and bolstering the reading confidence of my African American girls, this author sought to understand the appeal of urban fiction texts and explore methods for creating learning bridges between the genre and texts promoted within the curriculum.PURPOSENotwithstanding published findings regarding the poor reading outcomes for African American girls on nationally standardized tests (National Assessment of Educational Progress, NAEP, 2007, 2015), little research exists that probes the literacy experiences, habits and interests of members of this population (Buckley & Carter, 2005; Holcomb McCoy, 2005; Stevens, 1997; Sutherland, 2005); this study sought to address this gap in research. Based on the appeal of this genre for the African American adolescent female students, this study sought to* understand and catalogue the elements of urban fiction that served to inspire participants to read and engage with text and* more carefully consider how the participants interacted personally with those elements.This article will emphasize one major finding from the larger study (Gibson, 2009) that suggests that readers actively rather than passively engage with urban fiction specifically around the portrayal of African American women. Engagement with this genre presents an opportunity to1. create learning bridges between in-school and non- traditional texts and2. help heighten critical literacy for readers around stereotypic images of Blackness and womanhood.SIGNIFICANCEMany adults have formed intransigent and reductive outlooks about the urban fiction genre, based on the controversial content presented within the texts, without understanding the potential benefits of the novels. Despite containing hypersexualized, violent content and writing styles that are often inclusive of non-standard English, urban fiction texts are reaching many disengaged African American readers while more traditional forms of texts, in contrast, are failing to promote reading. This current study was built on the premise that strong out-of-school or non-dominant readings skills are needed to successfully navigate through and excel within schools (Delpit, 1988).Stereotypes about African American girls, such as the Sapphire, Jezebel, and Mammy, are reflective of the ways that society at large has exploited and pathologized their sexuality and intellect (Lindsey, 2013; Stephens & Phillips, 2003). Urban fiction often capitalizes on, and revels in, these stereotypes. Research supports connections between the prominence of these stereotypes and outcomes for African American females (Townsend, Thomas, Neilands, & Jackson, 2010). For instance, images of the Jezebel, or a Black woman who possesses an insatiable appetite to engage in sexual endeavors, are apparent within many representations of Black women in the media portrayals, including the abounding hypersexualized images perpetuated through certain subgenres of hip-hop music. Correspondingly, in an unfortunate example of life imitating depiction, 16% of African American adolescent girls will give birth by their 20th birthday (Health & Human Services, 2015). Additionally, the HIV rate for African American women is 20 times that of White woman and five times greater than Latino women (Centers for Disease Control, 2016). …

The Phantom Disaster: Spectacular Prosthetics in “The Jolly Corner”

“The Jolly Corner” provides a striking literary example of an image I call the “phantom disaster,” a technological catastrophe imagined but somehow—sometimes miraculously—averted. This image, which features so prominently in the conclusion of James’s 1908 story (one of his finest examples of urban American fiction) functioned in various forms of print culture during the early twentieth century to reassure consumers of the merits of new forms of technology despite their obvious potential to injure and disable bodies in unprecedented ways. Through this image, James interrogates the force of disability on cosmopolites who find themselves both aided and unsettled by their shifting environments.

Neomedievalism in Three Contemporary City Novels: Tobar, Adichie, Lee

Many recent novels of the metropolis imagine the city as a site of social struggle—even catastrophe—and highlight the needs of an exploited urban population that are not met by the nation-state. Displacing depictions of the modernist city as a site of aesthetic and personal liberation through flanerie or inter-ethnic contact, these novels envision a condition of extreme social crisis that coheres around certain neomedieval relations, even though the costuming and characterization do not evoke the knights and princesses familiar in more recognizable forms of neomedieval fantasy....this essay examines the central tropes of this sensibility in three celebrated works of urban fiction: Hector Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier (1998), Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014). Although varied in their political commitments, regional affiliations, and generic practices, these three novels share spatial and social patterns derived from a neomedieval vision of the city-state.

David James The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary FictionThe Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Edited by David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. v+287.

<i>David James</i> The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction<i>The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction</i>. Edited by David James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. v+287.

Toward a Literary Ecology: Places and Spaces in American Literature

In this book, editors Karen E. Waldron and Robert Friedman have assembled a collection of essays that study the interconnections between literature and the environment to theorize literary ecology. The disciplinary perspectives in these essays allow readers to comprehend places and environments, and to represent, express, or strive for that comprehension through literature. Contributors to this volume explore the works of several authors, including Gary Snyder, Karen Tei Yamashita, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Chip Ward, and Mary Oliver. Other essays discuss such topics as urban fiction as a model of literary ecology, the geographies of belonging in the work of Native American poets, and the literary ecology of place in "new" nature writing. Investigating texts for the complex interconnections they represent, this book suggests what such texts might teach us about the interconnections of our own world.

Spoken Word and Printed Page: G. W. M. Reynolds and ‘The Charing-Cross Revolution’, 1848

In March 1848, the radical writer and editor G. W. M. Reynolds came face-to-face with some of the very people he hoped were his readers, when he took a step out of the editor’s office and onto the speaker’s platform. Reynolds stood up in front of a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, and turned the issue of the day away from taxation and towards revolution. In that critical year of Europe-wide revolutions, Reynolds praised the recent French uprising and declared solidarity with the French republicans. Reynolds’s actions on that spring afternoon earned him immediate prominence in the Chartist movement, a place on the platform at the ‘monster meeting’ at Kennington Common on 10 April, the status of a radical celebrity, and a government file. The disorder after the meeting continued on and off over several days. This article considers Reynolds’s accounts of his own speech as printed in the pages of his best-selling serial narrative, <em>The Mysteries of London</em> (1844–48). Reynolds’s sprawling tale mixed melodrama with radical polemics in the belief that fiction was a legitimate means of promoting radical politics. This article argues that the insertions of his 1848 speeches attempted to connect imagined readers of urban fiction to real protestors on London’s streets, by linking the printed page of urban fiction to oratory within urban space. Reynolds’s speech-making on that March afternoon projected his outbursts in his London fiction out onto the London streets; he hoped that the combined work of both would push forward his political agenda. His experience of writing <em>The Mysteries of London</em> gave melodramatic wings to his oratory on the platform. Setting Reynolds’s speech within the context of his debt to popular melodrama and its roots in oral culture, and the oral effects within <em>The Mysteries of London</em> as a whole, this article argues that Reynolds’s actions declared printed matter to be indelibly linked with the street theatre of political demonstrations. Trafalgar Square offered Reynolds the possibility that urban space could present the continuation and implementation of radical demands made in print, and could bring radical print vocally to life.

From Escapism to Activism: Two Forms of Architectural Dissent in Romania

This article draws a comparison between two different forms of dissent against the dominant architectural system during and after communism in Romania. Martin Pinchis’ “urban fictions” in the 1960s and the “theoretical subversion” of the 1980s are brought together and then considered in relation to instances of more recent activism since around the 2000s.The argument is that in spite of the totally different conditions during and after communism, resistance might be understood similarly in both situations: architects escape direct confrontation with negative realities by producing new margins of action and enlarging the limits of architecture itself. The two attitudes are very different: one whole and utopian, the other acupunctural and circumstantial. Yet they both develop lateral fields of action beyond usual professional practice. The apparent “paradoxes of dissidence” - that the more architecture opposes reality the less able it is to change it, or that architecture opposes itself - are surpassed by this escapism.

"Something Like a Harlem Renaissance West": Black Popular Fiction, Self-Publishing, and the Origins of Street Literature: Interviews with Dr. Roland Jefferson and Odie Hawkins

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the popularity of self-published street literature (also known as urban literature, ghetto fiction, and hip-hop literature) has exploded among African American readers. Starting with the publication of titles such as Teri Woods’s True to the Game (1998), Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999), Vickie M. Stringer’s Let That Be the Reason (2001), and Nikki Turner’s A Hustler’s Wife (2003), street literature has emerged as a driving force in the African American publishing industry. Dozens of independent imprints, each publishing several books per year, sprang up virtually overnight, and now thousands of street literature novels compete for the attention of an ever-growing black readership. Some of the more influential independent publishers of this new genre include Urban Books, Teri Woods Publishing, and Stringer’s Triple Crown Publications, though new publishing houses arrive on the scene each year. Triple Crown Publications is probably the most successful of these new publishing houses, having sold more than a million books between its founding in 2001 and 2006. As a further indication of street literature’s growing power in the marketplace, mainstream trade publishers (including Ballantine Books, Simon and Schuster, and St. Martin’s Press) have begun offering six-figure, multiple-book deals to some of the biggest names in the business, including K’wan Foye, Shannon Holmes, and Turner. These books can be purchased at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com, at book vendor tables along 125th Street in Harlem, and in state and federal penitentiaries across the country. Street literature is particularly popular in American cities with large black populations, including New York, Detroit, Houston, Oakland, and Atlanta. At a moment when the

A Detective Story Writer: Exploring Stockholm as It Once Was

AbstractThere has been a change in the typical setting of detective fiction, from small, closed, tranquil communities to urban contexts of greater opacity and diversity. Its hero/heroine is thus now a recurrent figure in a global genre of urban fiction; and the actual detective story writer is a connoisseur of life in the big city. In this article I point to a certain affinity between detective stories and urban ethnography, and proceed to suggest some contrasts between Swedish writers who have recently achieved international fame and a writer of an earlier generation whom I knew personally. This is a way of demonstrating changes in the urban scene of Stockholm, and transformations in Swedish national society.

Book was there: reading in electronic times

Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a connoisseur of print, but as a card-carrying member of the first digital generation-and the father of two digital natives-he understands that we live in electronic times. Book Was There is Piper's surprising and always entertaining essay on reading in an e-reader world. Much ink has been spilled lamenting or championing the decline of printed books, but Piper shows that the rich history of reading itself offers unexpected clues to what lies in store for books, print or digital. From medieval manuscript books to today's playable media and interactive urban fictions, Piper explores the manifold ways that physical media have shaped how we read, while also observing his own children as they face the struggles and triumphs of learning to read. In doing so, he uncovers the intimate connections we develop with our reading materials - how we hold them, look at them, share them, play with them, and even where we read them - and shows how reading is interwoven with our experiences in life. Piper reveals that reading's many identities, past and present, on page and on screen, are the key to helping us understand the kind of reading we care about and how new technologies will - and will not - change old habits. Contending that our experience of reading belies naive generalizations about the future of books, Book Was There is an elegantly argued and thoroughly up-to-date tribute to the endurance of books in our ever-evolving digital world.

Urban Fiction and Multicultural Literature as Transformative Tools for Preparing English Teachers for Diverse Classrooms

Discussions of urban fiction and multicultural literature hold great potential for transforming the practice of beginning English teachers in diverse school settings. In this article, the authors,both teacher educators of color, present two case studies of preparing middle- and secondary-level English educators from a diversities perspective. Given continued conversations in the field of English education on how to best prepare new teachers for working effectively with diverse student populations, the authors present situated representations of how teachers’ critical encounters with literature can shape their learning to teach processes from the university classroom to their field experiences. Both case studies presented have a particular interest in the critical theoretical and pedagogical insights developed by preservice teachers through their discussions of children’s and adolescent literature that deals with diverse, urban, and multicultural perspectives. In doing so, these case studies reposition urban fiction and multicultural literature as transformative tools for teacher education curriculum.

Using Urban Fiction to Engage At‐Risk and Incarcerated Youths in Literacy Instruction

AbstractThe article presents a discussion of the potential of young adult urban fiction to engage at‐risk and incarcerated students in literacy instruction. The author provides an overview of the genre and an analysis of why young adult urban fiction is a good choice for educational use with at‐risk and incarcerated teens. The author also offers an evaluative process for selecting the best young adult urban fiction to use with these populations, and she shares some instructional ideas, including a list of books that met her evaluative criteria in her survey of 100 young adult urban fiction titles.

Feminism and the Streets: Urban Fiction and the Quest for Female Independence in the Era of Transactional Sexuality

Feminism and the Streets: Urban Fiction and the Quest for Female Independence in the Era of Transactional Sexuality