Description
Book SynopsisLee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of
The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at Helen DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt’s work in light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent social critique.
Trade ReviewFinally! I have been waiting for years for someone to give
The Last Samurai, the most inventive and delightful novel of the twenty-first century,
the critical attention it deserves. Lee Konstantinou has done it, and he has done it with amazing insight, clarity, and humor. His book will remain close at hand every time I reread and teach
The Last Samurai. -- Merve Emre, University of Oxford and contributing writer at the
New YorkerKonstantinou brings an entirely fresh perspective to this challenging novel. His rereading of
The Last Samurai draws powerful insights from sociological field theory while tempering the rigidities of that model with dazzling displays of interpretive finesse and a book historian’s nose for the quirky particulars of the case—the vivid, surprising details that may be found at the heart of every great literary-production story. -- James English, University of Pennsylvania
The Last Samurai Reread is a fascinating study of a novel whose remarkable origin story Lee Konstantinou brilliantly approaches as a story of our time. From his inspired decision to regard the book’s center of interest as less its Precocious Child than its Precarious Mother, to the way in which this ramifies outward into a meditation on aesthetic education in a late-capitalist era of crumbling infrastructure and increasing income inequality, Konstantinou’s compelling reading of DeWitt’s novel does something that the latter does explicitly: revive our imagination of a world in which nonalienated intellectual production might be a possibility for everyone. -- Sianne Ngai, author of
Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist FormFans of the novel shouldn’t miss this. * Publishers Weekly *
[An] accessible and thought-provoking study . . . [Konstantinou’s] nimble reporting and analysis enrich our understanding of DeWitt’s achievement while sketching a fascinating and cautionary portrait of the US publishing world. -- Heather Cass White * Times Literary Supplement *
Helen DeWitt’s great novel has received a much-needed strong and comprehensive reading. If you are a fan of DeWitt’s novel, as I am, you should read this book. -- Jay Innis Murray * Talking Big *
The Last Samurai Reread is an enjoyable -- and often eye-opening -- companion volume to the novel. -- M.A. Orthofer * The Complete Review *
Astute and sympathetic. -- David Trotter * London Review of Books *
Konstantinou’s nuanced account of [
The Last Samurai’s] path to publication, and its attempt to challenge the unquestioned standards of contemporary fiction, is compelling and consistently enlightening. -- Jonathan Foltz * American Literary History *
Table of ContentsPreface:
The Last Samurai, Unread
1. A Little Potboiler
2. Helen DeWitt’s Aesthetic Education
3. Synergy Is Crap
4. Fuck
The Chicago Manual of Style5. The Best Book of the Forty-Fifth Century
Coda: Through a Hole in the Wall
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
