This interdisciplinary book addresses the highly relevant debates about authenticity in North America, providing a contemporary re-examination of American culture, tourism and commodification of place.

Introduction Hyper-Authenticity 1. The Kept Weird: US American Weird Fiction and cities 2. Something Like a Circus or a Sewer': The Thrill and Threat of New York City in American Culture 3. "That Chinese guy is where you go if you want egg foo yung": Construction and Subversion of Exotic Culinary Authenticity in David Wong Louie's The Barbarians are Coming 4. Good Authentic Vibrations: The Beach Boys, California, and Pet Sounds 5. A Western Skyline I swear I can see: affective critical rurality expressed through contemporary Americana music 6. 'We Sure Didn't Know': Laura Gilpin, Mary Ann Nakai, and Cold War Politics on the Navajo Nation 7. Opening the Memory Boxes: Magical Hypereality, Authenticity and the Haida People 8. The Authenticity Paradox and the Western 9. Playing at Westworld - Gunfighters and Saloon Girls at the Tombstone Helldorado Festival 10. Hidden in the Mountains: Celebrating Swedish Heritage in Rural Pennsylvania 11. The Triumph of Trolls: The Making, Re-making and Commercialization of Heritage Identity 12. 'It is yet too soon to Write the History of the Revolution': Fashioning the Memory of Thomas Paine 13. Familiarity breeds content: shaping the nostalgic drift in postbellum plantation life-writing 14. Only Going One Way? Due South's Role in Sustaining Canadian Television