On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War - Hardcover

Daniel Grausam is Assistant Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis and the coeditor of the forthcoming American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War.

On Endings is a first-rate, completely coherent, extremely well-researched, and compellingly lucid contribution to our understanding of American literature during the Cold War. This book will be invaluable to people preparing to teach postwar American fiction.

On Endings is a very fine book exhibiting two virtues quite difficult to combine: first, a magisterial command of a substantial body of literature on postmodern fiction, nuclear proliferation, and the Cold War; and second, a laserlike focus on a single key point or problem upon which much of the originality of postmodern fiction turns: the problem of futurelessness, the actual prospect of an empty world―empty, at least, of human beings. The combination is very impressive indeed. The execution of the argument could hardly be stronger, and the topic could hardly be more important.

[I]nnovative, elaborate, highly intelligent, striking in its cleverness, and deeply provocative of big ideas about the significance of postmodern culture and the arguably novel features of life under the sign of the Bomb.