Combining creative and critical responses from some of today?s most progressive and innovative novelists, critics, and theorists, Fiction?s Present adventurously engages the aesthetic, political, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of contemporary fiction. By juxtaposing scholarly articles with essays by practicing novelists, the book takes up not only the current state of literature and its criticism but also connections between contemporary philosophy and contemporary fiction. In doing so, the contributors aim to provoke further discussion of the present inflection of fiction?a present that can be seen as Janus-faced, looking both forward to the novel?s radically changed, political, economic, and technological circumstances, and back to its history of achievements and problems.