This volume reads the incredibly rich body of 1990s American fiction in the context of key cultural concerns of the period. It examines texts by established authors such as Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Sherman Alexie, Chang-rae Lee, E. Annie Proulx, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen.

1. Introduction - Jay Prosser. Transnational Borders. 2. Outside In: Latino/a Un-bordering in US Fiction - A. Robert Lee. 3. "Come change your destiny, turn suffering into silver and joy": Constituting Americans - Nahem Yousaf. 4. America as Diaphor: Cultural Translation in Bharati Mukherjee's The Holder of the World - Krishna Sen. Race Cathexes. 5. Red, White and Black: Racial Exchanges in Fiction by Sherman Alexie - Andrew Dix. 6. In the Shadow of the Gun: African-American Fiction and the Anxieties of Nostalgia - Andrew Warnes. 7. Tragic No More?: The Reappearance of the Racially Mixed Character - Suzanne W. Jones. Historical Narratives. 8. The Way We Were(n't): Origins and Empire in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon - Stacey Olster. 9. Contesting the Historical Pastoral in Philip Roth's American Trilogy - Derek Parker Royal. 10. Skating on a shit field: Tim O'Brien and the topography of trauma - Brian Jarvis. Sex Images. 11. A Painful Progress: Queer Fiction and the American Protest Literature Tradition - Zoe Trodd. 12. Regular Lolitas: The Afterlives of an American Adolescent - Kasia Boddy. 13. Glamorama, Fight Club, and the Terror of Narcissistic Abjection - Alex Blazer. Postmodern Technologies. 14. Beyond the Cold War in Don DeLillo's Mao II and Underworld - Peter Knight. 15. Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest - Timothy Aubry. 16. The End of Postmodernism: American Fiction at the Millennium - Stephen J. Burn.