Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women, Part I Kathe Callahan One can only marvel at

One can only marvel at the sweep of her imagination her steadfast allegiance to the downtrodden whether out in the wider world or watching from an inner-city balcony at every stage of the passage

to our understanding of black spirituality and religion

and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life

What might it look like to expand beyond the scripts we've been given and bring our questions to God--as well as building solidarity with the marginalized

Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First-Century Women, Part I Kathe Callahan One can only marvel atIn a 2000 review of Zadie Smith's White Teeth, critic James Wood dismissed the genre of "big, ambitious novels" which he claimed were too dense with information to express any authentic feeling as "hysterical realism." The contributors to these special issues take Wood's derisive claims as a rallying cry to examine encyclopedic or maximalist novels by women published in the past two decades, including works by Emil Ferris, Valeria Luiselli, Ruth