This chapter explores the Jewish American literature of Los Angeles by contrasting it with the more prominent Jewish literary traditions of New York and Chicago. Birns delves into the complexities of Jewish life in the city as represented in the works of Harris Newmark, Aben Kandel, Nathanael West, Budd Schulberg, and Eve Babitz. He also addresses the contributions of genre fiction writers like Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Rochelle Krich, and Walter Mosley, and concludes by considering the differing approaches to history and memory offered in prose by Gina Nahai and Harry Turtledove, and in poetry by Boris Dralyuk. Birns suggests that, while the Jewish literary tradition of Los Angeles may not have commanded a level of attention to match those of other American metropolises, it is a powerfully future-facing tradition, resisting assimilative impulses and engaging consistently with multicultural and diasporic paradigms.

Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. Perhaps no literary genre has made such a dramatic journey from critically dismissed literary margins to the critically lauded literary-lauded mainstream as science fiction, a genre in whose development Los Angeles played a significant role, as David Sandner demonstrates throughout his chapter. Sandner’s narrative takes us from early zine culture in the 1940s and 1950s, via Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (famously written at UCLA on rented typewriters), to countercultural works of the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond this point, Sandner identifies LA, in all its multiethnic complexity, as playing an inevitably central role in the genre’s diversification, represented in the form of Ernest Hogan’s pioneering Chicano science fiction and Pasadena native Octavia Butler’s frequent collocation of Southern California settings with both speculative worlds and speculations on Blackness. Other counter-futures and alternate histories are found in works by Kim Stanley Robinson and Sesshu Foster.

Los Angeles literature’s historically marginal place in the American canon can partly be attributed to the prominence of “popular” literatures in its cultural production. This chapter addresses the literary tradition with which LA is perhaps most frequently associated, especially in the popular imagination: crime fiction, in the lineage established by Raymond Chandler. Norman observes how, in Chandler’s genre-defining writings, Los Angeles is charted as a topography of absent, empty, alienated spaces – establishing enduringly powerful visions of the city. Norman then turns to Ross Macdonald’s debts to and departures from Chandler, the complex nostalgia for a midcentury city built upon White supremacy that animates James Ellroy’s police procedurals, and Walter Mosley’s transformative reconfiguration of the iconic lone private eye as an African American.

This chapter argues that the resurgence of genre fiction in the contemporary period demonstrates alterations in the status of romance kinds rather than the direct impact of postmodernism. Novels make possible worlds; the actions staged in imagined worlds need not be verisimilar or plausible. Though realism has been the dominant mode of the novel, it is not the only option, especially for writers who have read widely in genre fiction since childhood. Postmodernism is not required to explain why the characteristics of romance narratives persist. Genre fiction’s thrilling plots, strong affects of suspense, curiosity, and wonder, larger-than-life characters, and reliance on supernatural explanations or conspiracy theories, have invigorated contemporary fiction. Postmodernism is best understood as a style whose adoption expresses a writer’s desire to be considered experimental, irreverent, up-to-date, and still “literary.” Emergent patterns of prize-winning novels show the erosion of the distinction between literary and genre fiction.

This chapter argues that young adult (YA) fiction is, fundamentally, utopian in the broadest sense, given that it is produced for the consumption of adolescent and young adult readers who are looking for guidance or entertainment in the pursuit of their own better futures. At times, though, such work also engages larger questions that exceed the limited purview of individual self-betterment and that approach concerns about the proper – and better – organization and maintenance of society. Specifically, such work seems at times actively to theorize the cultivation of hope as a practice, even a method. This chapter examines how YA fiction engages hope as a method in three distinct modes: through critical dystopias, in failed or problematic utopias, and in utopias in process.

Regional literature plays a bigger part in the ‘national story’ than is generally acknowledged in Australia; indeed, paying attention to regional writing intervenes in prevailing ways of thinking about national literary history. Regional literature does not sit inside a broader national frame, but instead intersects in dynamic ways in the production of Australian regions that map across local, national and even global coordinates. This chapter engages with the regional novel in Australia as an historic, contemporary and future-making force with diverse community investment. It maps the rich history of regional writing in Australia and assembles an account of regional literary scholarship, from the literary history of the Western Australian Wheatbelt, to Queensland’s mining towns, to Tasmania and the Northern Territory, to Gippsland and the Mallee in Victoria. It considers the scope of different studies of regional literature, and the ways in which regional literature has been conceived and received. While regional literary histories have often sought to highlight neglected or little-known literary works, some have also perpetuated narrow narratives of place through traditional definitions of what counts as regional writing. This chapter advocates an expanded view of the regional novel from the nineteenth century to today, acknowledging the ancient histories of storytelling and extending the coordinates of what ‘counts’ as regional. It seeks to affirm the influence of works of genre fiction which frequently have clearly defined regional settings but are not always included in national histories of literature. Broadening definitions of the regional novel allows a more inclusive account of Australian writing, bringing into visibility more diverse Australian places and texts.

This chapter draws on dozens of interviews with Australian crime, fantasy and romance fiction writers and publishing professionals conducted for the ‘Genre Worlds’ project on contemporary Australian popular fiction (2016–19). It analyses features of the genre worlds of Australian fantasy, crime and romance fiction in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Key focal points include Australian genre fiction’s role within large and small publishing houses, its uptake of self-publishing technologies, the use of social media for networking and marketing, and the importance of festivals, conventions and associations. The chapter demonstrates how the specific textual, social and industrial conventions of Australian genre fiction developed over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Across his oeuvre, Ishiguro has imaginatively reworked a host of literary and artistic genres, from the debts to the gothic tradition in A Pale View of Hills to the science fiction thematics of Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun. At the same time, he has expressed ambivalence and even hostility towards the genres his novels draw on, prompting polemical responses from such influential writers of genre fiction as Ursula K. Le Guin, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood. This chapter sheds light on Ishiguro’s distinctively equivocal relation to genre fiction by examining how his four most recent novels self-consciously engage with and exploit the genres of detective, dystopian, fantasy, and science fiction.

This chapter traces a path from the literary canonization of traditional forms of paraliterature, such as detective fiction and science fiction, to Latin American authors’ recent engagement with extraliterary reading practices. It also expands the definition of paraliterature to include widely disseminated informational and regulatory texts not typically considered literary, such as encyclopedias and state-administered exams, and examines paraliterature’s intersections with the avant-garde. Using a theoretical framework centered on Latin American ideas of engaged and “postautonomous” literature, this chapter first examines the embrace of popular categories of genre fiction by literary writers and then turns to autofictional, testimonial, and pseudo-referential works that cross boundaries between literature and the real. Through works from canonical authors such as Roberto Bolaño, Horacio Castellanos Moya, and Diamela Eltit, as well as younger writers such as Verónica Stigger, Ricardo Lísias, and Ena Lucía Portela, this chapter addresses ways in which contemporary fiction and poetry intersect with their sociopolitical contexts and call into question the limits and purposes of literary writing and reading practices.

Chapter 23 focuses on the translation of literary prose, a broad genre that ranges across children’s literature, genre fiction, and literary and lyrical fiction, each of which presents different primary foci, from style to plot, but tends towards a narrative core of characters, setting and process. Translators of literary prose face textual and contextual practical challenges in catching the cadence, rhythm and music of a text, since stylistic variation can be crucial in characterization and plot development. Figurative language, selectional restrictions, humour, allusions and quotations tend to be culturally specific and to add to the challenges presented by indeterminacy, ambiguity, inference and implicatures, all of which rely on contextual understanding and may need to be explicitated in a translation.

The display shelves of Irish bookstores, while showcasing the occasional Yeats collection or Joyce novel, are filled largely with crime fiction, romance novels, and young adult (YA) books. This chapter surveys the status of the crime novel in Ireland, a topic that has drawn established “highbrow” writers such as John Banville, who writes successful crime novels under the pseudonym of Benjamin Bratton, as well as other talented scribes including Tana French. This chapter also examines the popular romance, or “chick lit” – a genre dominated by Irish women writers since the days of Rosa Mulholland – and its success in work by Marian Keyes, Cecelia Ahern, and Sarah Harte. It also attends to the growing influence of children’s and young adult fiction, particularly focusing on the boom in YA fiction, led by writers such as Louise O’Neill. What do these books, and their popularity, tell us about contemporary Ireland? Are these forms of genre fiction inherently conservative?

From the uncanny werewolf families and zombie border patrol guards in the novels of Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet) to the digital citizens and virtually-enhanced tourists in Cherokee writer Blake Hausman's novel Riding the Trail of Tears, Native Americans are creating strange and scintillating new worlds of unforeseen horrors and possibilities. Such works engage the popular genres of horror and fantasy in order to mobilize sophisticated political critiques of capitalism, globalization, and the colonial imbrications of Indigenous peoples, albeit in surprising, genre-bending forms. This chapter explores the features of this new and vibrant field, offering readings of some of its most provocative titles and suggesting ways that such works can help critics and readers chart fresh, productive pathways into both the histories and the futures of North American Indigenous populations. In the very act of strengthening and deepening the connections between the speculative and the real, Native writers craft methodologies of resistance.

Discussions about the state of Irish fiction during and after the Celtic Tiger often centred on the issue of cliché, as detractors criticised writers for rehearsing timeworn tropes instead of addressing the vertiginous upheavals of the boom and bust. This chapter considers the gendered and generic underpinnings of that claim. More than an aesthetic pitfall, cliché serves as a constitutive feature of post-Celtic Tiger women’s fiction. In Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz (2011) and Tana French’s Broken Harbor (2012), narrators draw upon conventions derived from post-war genre fiction in order to reinforce fraying narratives of bourgeois happiness and success. While cliché provides temporary narrative and affective ballast amid recession, it also enmeshes women novelists within ongoing debates about the value of genre in an evolving literary marketplace.