The Gentrification Plot

Reviews / Votes

Compelling and sophisticated, The Gentrification Plot offers richly detailed readings of recent NYC crime fiction that delineate and critique the destructive effects of gentrification. Heise's attention to shifts in geography and genre adds to the critical framework for reading, understanding, and appreciating the ethical stakes of contemporary fiction. -- Kathy Knapp, author of <i>American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel After 9/11</i> In this excellent book, Thomas Heise argues that gentrification transformed not just the neighborhoods of New York City but also the city's crime novels. Providing a new and inventive lens for reading crime fiction, Heise convincingly shows how the quintessentially urban genre of the crime novel found itself unavoidably implicated in the politics of gentrification and real estate speculation. At once an innovative history of contemporary crime fiction and an eye-opening account of gentrification's impact on individual neighborhoods and communities, The Gentrification Plot is a major work in an important field. -- Theodore Martin, author of <i>Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present</i> In this groundbreaking book, Heise unlocks the multiple meanings of "plot" to cast new light on the complex links among crime, property, policing, race, and literature. With a diverse group of contemporary novelists as his guide, he brilliantly shows us how the gentrification of New York City stands in for and enacts the logic of crime as much as murder and theft. One of the best books on its subject I have ever read. -- Andrew Pepper, author of <i>Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State</i> The range of Heise's scholarship is impressive and diverse, and his analyses are intelligently presented. He writes with assurance about and passion for his subject. The Gentrification Plot is a significant contribution to crime fiction scholarship. * Choice Reviews * [A] highly recommended read for those who are fascinated by New York City as a matter of investigation. Readers who loved the meta-detective stories in The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, or essay collections like The Lonely City by Olivia Laing particularly for the discourse around Manhattan law-and-order policing of the 2000s, will find in The Gentrification Plot new, precious insights about contemporary socio-spatial transformations. * LSE Review of Books * The Gentrification Plot provides a nuanced, expertly read literary account of neoliberalization, changing modes of production, racial capitalism, and the social production of space. It is a book that could only be written by someone deeply intimate with New York City itself-able to see its impasses all the more clearly because of love[.] * American Literary History *