The collection of essays in Postmodern/Postwar and After, edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden, is both wide ranging and theoretically rigorous. This collection will likely appeal more to academics, or former academics like myself, who enjoy both literature and thinking about literature.

A strength of the book, from my perspective, is that it establishes a contextualization through historicizing the periods or styles of writing, then manages to present a path forward without completely disregarding the past. In other words, while many seem to want to completely dismiss postmodernism for its faults and ignore any insights (or worse, claim those insights as being from something else altogether) the general idea here is one of taking the good and leaving the rest. What constitutes the good and bad is certainly subjective and will differ from person to person.

As Michael Docherty says in a footnote to his US Studies Online essay about Richard Yates, Postmodern/Postwar and After talks about "meld[ing] postmodernism’s formal playfulness and self-reflexivity with the social and affective concerns of realism." It is this idea of moving forward with every tool we have learned over the years even if we didn't care for how they were first implemented that appeals to me.

I would recommend this not only to academics but those readers who enjoy thinking about where fiction has been and where it is going. While academic in scope and tone the writing is, for the most part, accessible to most readers.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.