the story of American literature’s relation to the rest of the world, however. While foreign literature no doubt could and should take up more shelf space in American bookstores and homes, American authors are not necessarily guilty of the isolationist tendencies that characterize the US book market. In his broad-spectrum critique Horace Engdahl tars different actors in the American literary field with the same brush, but the question is whether an isolationist book market automatically results in isolationist fiction, and whether American publishers’ lack of interest in the rest of the world rubs off on American writers by default. Some critics do consider contemporary American fiction to be marked by just such an introspective turn. In his interesting article “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at aforemost live between cultures, between the traditional unity of the national state and the hybridity of the global market,4 and this unique historical situation creates certain possibilities and challenges for American writers: Now more than ever, Americans find themselves caught between the conflicting interests and voices that constitute the national debate, situated at a peculiarly awkward meeting place between the culture(s) of the nation and the culture of the global marketplace – and perhaps above all, faced with the challenge of new forms of otherness that are at best virulently critical and at worst obscenely violent. What this offers to American writers, and particularly novelists, is the chance, maybe the obligation, to insert themselves into the space between conflicting interests and practices and then dramatize the contradictions that