Since the 1960s, academics have theorized that literature is on its way to becoming obsolete, or, at the very least, has lost part of its power as an influential medium of social and cultural critique. This work argues against that misconception and maintains that contemporary American literature is not only alive and well, but that it has grown in significant ways that reflect changes in American culture during the last twenty years. The author's use of the term "hybrid" is similar to that of Mikhail Bakhtin; for Bakhtin, language is by definition a hybrid form and literature, most specifically the novel, is a form that allows writers to blend distinct and often opposing social languages. The author considers hybrid fictions from Modernists to Gen Xers, hybrid desires, hybrid identities and conflicting relationships, ethnic hybridity, hybrid technologies, and hypertext, the Internet and the future of printed fiction. David Foster Wallace, Richard Powers, Neal Stephenson, Douglas Coupland, Sherman Alexie, William Vollmann, Michele Serros and Dave Eggers are among those Gen Xers whose hybrid fictions are discussed....

Writing the Future of Black America explores the work of eight representative African American writers of the hip-hop generation to assess their common themes and offer insights into contemporary race relations in America as expressed and challenged in their works. In this groundbreaking study, Daniel Grassian takes as his subjects a group of impressive novelists, essayists, poets, and playwrights—Paul Beatty, Trey Ellis, Terrence Hayes, Allison Joseph, Jake Lamar, Suzan-Lori Parks, Danzy Senna, and Colson Whitehead—to chart the depths of their literary work against that of their predecessors in the civil rights generation and their predominantly white contemporaries of Generation X.

Characterized by the pursuit of empowerment through hybridity, social criticism, and personal expression, hip-hop has become the music and culture of choice for a sizable portion of America, regardless of race or socioeconomic standing. Meanwhile the writers of this generation have received little serious critical attention, aside from singular book reviews and occasional essays. Grassian fills in a gap in the discourse with his thorough analysis of the works crafted by these distinguished hip-hop writers, and he makes a case for the validity and value of studying their sophisticated engagements with race in contemporary America. Selected because their work addresses a broad range of African American life, these writers fathom such topics as what it means to be African American or multiethnic in an increasingly global society, what role art and literature play in affecting their communities, and what positive and negative authority has been assigned to popular culture (and hip-hop culture specifically) in modern African American life....