You Don't Have To Live Like This
- Submitting institution
-
Royal Holloway and Bedford New College
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 30400998
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Faber and Faber
- ISBN
- 978-0-571-31340-2
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- Following REF consultation guidance on outputs re novels.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- In order to investigate the experience and significance of social change in contemporary America, Markovits’s novel You Don’t Have to Live Like This plays with the line between fact and fiction. Obama has a cameo in it (which was excerpted in deadspin.com), and the book also makes use of and responds to such non-fiction resources as Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. To explore the consequences of intervention in social change, it frames the narrative around the attempt of a group of Yale graduates to revive a neighbourhood in Detroit by buying up the real estate and trying to set up a kind of socialist society. This experiment inevitably creates tensions with the people, mostly poor and Black, who are already living there. Recognition of its significance is reflected in the award of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction in 2015 and the fact that on the back of its publication, Markovits has been asked to participate in conferences and public debates such as the LSE’s Utopia event, for their Space for Thought Literary Festival in 2016. It was widely reviewed and was named one of the books of the year in the TLS, Independent and Guardian.
In 2019 an Oxford conference on his work was postponed because of the pandemic – the collection of essays that was to come out of it will be published by Glyphi.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -