“Swallowing a World offers a brilliant and refreshing account of the contemporary global novel as a maximalist form that both captures the capacious diversity of globalization and transforms erstwhile encyclopedic genres. Familiar works by Salmon Rushdie and Zadie Smith appear in sparklingly new garb, and first-time novels like The Old Drift trouble a distinguished, and mostly male, maximalist lineage that includes the epic, the encyclopedia, and Menippean satire.”—Debjani Ganguly, author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form
“Bergholtz makes a powerful and elegant case for the significance and urgency of his subject, addressing compellingly the maximalist novel genre’s particular relevance to and engagement with our time—the era of late globalization. Swallowing a World strikes me as the best book published in this area in the post–Cold War years. . . . His work is eminently readable.”—Christian Moraru, author of Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary
“Overwhelmed as we are by the impacts of globalization, climate change, and disinformation campaigns, why would we want to read exceedingly long novels? Bergholtz’s answer: ‘maximalist’ fiction offers our exhausted imaginations a reading process that can sustain and inspire us.”—Elena Machado Sáez, author of Market Aesthetics and coauthor of The Latino/a Canon
“Benjamin Bergholtz’s sharp and compelling Swallowing a World will long stand as a landmark in the fast-growing field of maximalist novel studies.”—Stefano Ercolino, author of The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” to Roberto Bolaño’s “2666”
