Explore the vast range of titles available.

Why do Americans read contemporary fiction? This question seems simple, but is it? Do Americans read for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation? To satisfy their own insatiable intellectual curiosities? While other forms of media have come to monopolize consumers' leisure time, in the past two decades book clubs have proliferated, Amazon has sponsored thriving online discussions, Oprah Winfrey has inspired millions of viewers to read both contemporary works and classics, and novels have retained their devoted following within middlebrow communities. InReading as Therapy, Timothy Aubry argues that contemporary fiction serves primarily as a therapeutic tool for lonely, dissatisfied middle-class American readers, one that validates their own private dysfunctions while supporting elusive communities of strangers unified by shared feelings. Aubry persuasively makes the case that contemporary literature's persistent appeal depends upon its capacity to perform a therapeutic function. Aubry traces the growth and proliferation of psychological concepts focused on the subjective interior within mainstream, middle-class society and the impact this has had on contemporary fiction. The prevailing tendency among academic critics has been to decry the personal emphasis of contemporary fiction as complicit with the rise of a narcissistic culture, the ascendency of liberal individualism, and the breakdown of public life.Reading as Therapy, by contrast, underscores the varied ideological effects that therapeutic culture can foster. To uncover the many unpredictable ways in which contemporary literature answers the psychological needs of its readers, Aubry considers several different venues of reader-response-including Oprah's Book Club and Amazon customer reviews-the promotional strategies of publishing houses, and a variety of contemporary texts, ranging from Khaled Hosseini'sThe Kite Runnerto Anita Shreve'sThe Pilot's Wifeto David Foster Wallace'sInfinite Jest. He concludes that, in the face of an atomistic social landscape, contemporary fiction gives readers a therapeutic vocabulary that both reinforces the private sphere and creates surprising forms of sympathy and solidarity among strangers.

[...]I turn now to several political responses to the novel so as to uncover evidence of this satisfaction, to bring out, as it were, the love that Beloved so desperately seeks and that critics so stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. [...]the day Sethe attempts to murder him, Bodwin is visiting the house where she lives, but also where he was born, partially in the hopes of recovering a box of tin soldiers he buried there as a child; thus his fate and interests intersect with Sethe's, though his personal motive for the visit might also be read as proof of his \"self-absorption\" (417). [...]given Zižek's status as the foremost celebrity theorist within literary studies, one might say that he exemplifies the predicament of the entire discipline: compelled by a guilty conscience to sacrifice the very thing it secretly cherishes, aesthetic pleasure, in the service of an impossible fantasy of revolutionary political efficacy. [...]exacerbating the difficulties of such projects, according to Michaels, is the premium placed on subjective experience, which leads people to view history not merely as something you can learn about, but as something you can either remember or forget, even if you were not alive during the events in question. [...]many proponents of ethnic pride, Morrison among them, suggest that members of a particular ethnicity enjoy a privileged access to the struggles and challenges their ancestors faced in history, as if the members are somehow personally haunted by that history.

This article examines Winfrey's book club discussion of Toni Morrison's Paradise in order to identify various continuities and gaps between the aspirations of serious literature and the inclinations of middlebrow readers. Many of Winfrey's audience members complain about the text's inaccessibility, thus casting doubt upon Morrison's purported aim: to redefine paradise as a state of inclusivity. Nevertheless, even as they contest the novel's literary value, the participants engage in just the sort of egalitarian and rigorous conversation Morrison sees as an indispensable part of any constructive utopian politics.

While Ransom worried that the expansion of scientific forms of thought within the twentieth century would entail a corresponding marginalization of literature, he also recognized that criticism would need to appropriate scientific protocols in order to achieve academic legitimacy. “Criticism,” he maintains, “must become more scientific, or precise and systematic, and this means that it must be developed by the collective and sustained effort of learned persons – which means that its proper seat is in the universities” (The World’s Body 329). Thus during the 1920s and 1930s, Ransom and his fellow New Critics, including Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and W.K. Wimsatt, devised a series of systematic principles and critical procedures aimed at lending rigor to the practice of criticism. In particular, Wimsatt’s famous admonition against the “intentional” and the “affective” fallacies attempted to sequester the feelings and thoughts of the author and the reader from the act of criticism, in order, like any scientific practice, to isolate the object under investigation from all extraneous phenomena and to reduce the influence of the investigator’s own bias.

[...]it may well be that the particular kinds of contributions, the intellectual, ethical, and affective resources that humanistic study offers society, do not lend themselves easily to scientific demonstration or quantification. [...]to attempt to assess these contributions in such terms runs the risk of capitulating to the very corporate values, centered on immediate measurable utility, against which the discipline of the humanities must, in order to establish its own specific raison d'être, define itself.

This essay considers the American reception of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner in the context of the Bush administration's global war on terrorism by examining the customer reviews of the novel posted on Amazon. As many of the responses indicate, identification serves as a paradoxical means of negotiating with fictional representations of foreignness. The intense and painful empathy inspired by The Kite Runner serves a valorizing function for American readers, strengthening their sense of their own humanity—an effect that resists strict political categorization. Hosseini's ambivalent conception of what it means to be human, I argue, supports a diversity of competing attitudes toward the United States' military intervention in the Middle East and central Asia, while simultaneously catering to fantasies of escape from ideological and cultural divisions altogether.

This study examined the psychometric properties of the Mesure d’impact 45 (MI-45), which is the French translation of the commonly used scale called Outcome Questionnaire-45 (OQ-45). The measure is a self-report tool designed to evaluate change in client functioning in the context of receiving mental health services. We recruited two nonclinical samples of university students as well as a clinical sample from a university-based training centre that delivers psychological services to the community. The MI-45 and other measures completed by the participants in these samples are presented. The psychometric properties calculated based on participants’ responses suggest the French MI-45 is comparable to the original English version and the versions available in other languages. The MI-45 additionally demonstrates good agreement with the English version completed by bilingual nonclinical participants as well as a good convergent validity with measures of psychological symptoms or, inversely, measures of psychological well-being. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)

Aubry examines one particular work, The Pilot's Wife, by Anita Shreve, an Oprah's Book Club selection about the efforts of a widowed pilot's wife to make sense of the plane crash that killed her husband. Undeniably psychological in its emphasis, Shreve's text nevertheless demonstrates the capacity of individual-centered, therapeutic discourse to describe larger social formations and class anxieties through the depiction of a single character's conspicuously conventional interiority. More importantly, instead of retreating from politics, The Pilot's Wife works actively to politicize the domestic sphere in a systematic fashion, cataloguing the ways in which the husband's secret affiliation with the Irish Republican Army has shaped the protagonist's family dynamics.