Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel

The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel

Heise, Thomas

Paperback

Series: Literature Now

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0231200196
ISBN13: 9780231200196
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: Dec 7 2021
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.95
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

For decades, crime novelists have set their stories in New York City, a place long famed for decay, danger, and intrigue. What happens when the mean streets of the city are no longer quite so mean? In the wake of an unprecedented drop in crime in the 1990s and the real-estate development boom in the early 2000s, a new suspect is on the scene: gentrification.

Thomas Heise identifies and investigates the emerging gentrification plot in contemporary crime fiction. He considers recent novels that depict the sweeping transformations of five iconic neighborhoods--the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Red Hook, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant--that have been central to African American, Latinx, immigrant, and blue-collar life in the city. Heise reads works by Richard Price, Henry Chang, Gabriel Cohen, Reggie Nadelson, Ivy Pochoda, Grace Edwards, Ernesto Quiñonez, Wil Medearis, and Brian Platzer, tracking their representations of broken-windows policing, cultural erasure, racial conflict, class grievance, and displacement. Placing their novels in conversation with oral histories, urban planning, and policing theory, he explores crime fiction's contradictory and ambivalent portrayals of the postindustrial city's dizzying metamorphoses while underscoring the material conditions of the genre. A timely and powerful book, The Gentrification Plot reveals how today's crime writers narrate the death--or murder--of a place and a way of life.

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