What do these books have in common?

“The principal subject of mainstream literary fiction today is the way we live now, meaning the way the upper middle class lives now.

If Raymond Carver was the master of the death of the American dream, Franzen is the chronicler of its ghostly persistence — the combination of economic growth with deepening insecurity.

The natural terrain of this generational struggle is college and life just after college, the setting of The Corrections and Freedom,but also of Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.”

The Literature of the Second Gilded Age by Stephen Marche

Watch the LARB video interview at the LA Times Festival of Books with Tom Bissell, about his new book Magic Hours and writing video games.

And be sure to catch LARB‘s recent interviews with authors Margaret Atwood and Rachel Kushner as well!

Rachel Kushner is a New York-based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, and Grand Street. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a New York Times bestseller and finalist for the 2008 National Book Award.

Watch this recent LARB interview with Rachel Kushner at the LA Times Festival of Books.