We would appear to live in an era when the power of fiction is on the wane. Despite many private universities' endowments' growth to record heights during an ongoing (and partially college-fueled) pandemic, literature departments face uncertain futures and the ranks of un- and underemployed literary critics grow with each PhD defense. The import of fiction in such a historical moment is far from obvious. While we might turn inward for answers—to the classic work of Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, to more recent work in the digital and environmental humanities, or to the accumulating, never-to-be-published dissertations of the unhired—Lindsay Thomas asks us not merely to consider how we read and analyze literary and popular fiction. Rather, in her monograph Training for Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security after 9/11, she asks us to widen our understanding of where, how, and why fiction is produced in the post-9/11 United States,...

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