New in paperback. Hardcover was published in 2017. Through new histories of the novel of manners, film noir, the western, detective fiction, and the post-apocalyptic novel, Theodore Martin shows how the problem of the contemporary preoccupies a wide range of novelists and filmmakers, including Zadie Smith, Colson Whitehead, Vikram Chandra, China Miéville, Kelly Reichardt, and the Coen brothers.