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In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counterculture figures like Coffee House's Allan Kornblum and Milkweed's Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público's Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press's Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive's John O'Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Nonprofits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers' finances-conglomerate and nonprofit-created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of

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This essay develops a poetics of microfinance through an attempt to account for Jhumpa Lahiri's strange mention of the Grameen Bank in the short story “Sexy” from her collection Interpreter of Maladies. It shows how Lahiri's allusion links the intimacy of simulated global space to a central development in contemporary transnational economics. Exploring the discourses promulgated by the Grameen Bank and Kiva, a successful nonprofit microcredit organization based out of San Francisco, the essay reveals what makes microfinance seductive as a form of aid. The poetics of microfinance offers subjects a model through which they can link interpersonal intimacy to global financial projects. Lahiri's story features a scale model of the globe in a building called the Mapparium. The Mapparium is a simulacrum that produces the illusion of global intimacy, which emerges from the frisson of feeling both central and close to everywhere, a sense of nearness across distance. This essay argues that microfinance institutions such as Kiva use the poetics of microfinance to bridge bodily affect with abstract finance, thereby profiting from the further immiseration of the world's poor.

Giovanni Arrighi ends The Long Twentieth Century with a vision of “capitalism burning up humanity ‘in the horrors (or glories) of…escalating violence’” (Chakrabarty 200). This is a tidy summary of the worldview shared by the texts studied in this book. Thirteen years later, in Adam Smith in Beijing...