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This volume is a review that attempts to sketch a “floor plan” of American contemporary novels. An examination of existing reviews and research on American contemporary novels reveals that those dealing with the period up to the 1980s focus on metafiction, while those dealing with the 1990s and later are primarily about ethnic literature. The discussion in this volume agrees with these historical divisions but strives to maintain a bird’s-eye view that encompasses both.
 
Based on this approach, each chapter features novels of various genres and types that have colored the contemporary American literary scene, introducing several writers representative of each. Generally, I include at least one writer active during the Cold War and one after the Cold War for a glimpse into the development of each genre and the changes according to the times. These “principles” are not applied in all chapters partly because the novels popular during the Cold War often became less popular afterward or because the types of novels not prominent (or that were seldom written) before the Cold War might have become popular afterward.
 
This transition inevitably imbues the volume’s discussion with a “postwar literary history” character. This is also true of the structure of the volume as a whole, with the first half focusing on various types of novels, including so-called “genre