First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In individual chapters on Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich and a chapter on selected novelists of the Vietnam War, this book explores how the apparent social realism of this fiction betrays equally persistent concerns with literary representation and experimentalism. While noting the frequency with which these writers depict characters as actual or symbolic authors and readers, this study suggests that these postmodern works, for all their self-reflexiveness, so take on a mediating relationship to the world. The central characters in these texts are themselves storytellers and readers, whose stories at once connect up to the world of experience and throw us back on the problematics of storytelling.