1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

edited by Heinz Antor and Klaus Stierstorfer (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), pp.
221–243.
Traces Delaney Mossbacher’s fear-driven descent into racial intolerance.

Heather J. Hicks, “On Whiteness in T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain,”
Critique, 45 (Fall 2003): 43–64.
Argues that Boyle attempts “to delineate the contemporary meanings of white-
ness through a set of metaphoric relations and satirical figures.”

Kathy Knapp, “‘Ain’t No Friend of Mine’: Immigration Policy, The Gated Com-
munity, and the Problem with the Disposable Worker in T. C. Boyle’s Tortilla
Curtain,” Atenea, 28 (December 2008): 121–134.
Explores the hypocrisy of American immigration policy and the desire of the
dominant culture to “render... workers [like America and Candido] invisible.”

Gregory Meyerson, “Tortilla Curtain and The Ecology of Fear,” Contracorriente:
A Journal on Social History and Literature in Latin America, 2 (Fall 2004):
67–91.
Looks at Boyle’s literary referents, as well as the intersections of his novel and
Southern California urban theorist Mike Davis’s City of Quartz (1990) and Ecol-
ogy of Fear (1998).

Elisabeth Schäfer-Wünsche, “Borders and Catastrophes: T. C. Boyle’s Califor-
nian Ecology,” in Space in America: Theory, History, Culture, edited by Klaus
Benesch and Kerstin Schmidt (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp.
401–417.
Interprets Boyle’s “fictionalization of Californian spaces” as both ironic nature
writing and a “dialogic reading” of texts by urban theorist Mike Davis, who writes
about the effect of built environments on natural settings.

Scott Spencer, “The Pilgrim of Topanga Creek,” New York Times, 3 Septem-
ber 1995 http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/08/home/boyle-tortilla.
html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Tortilla%20Curtain&st=cse [accessed 13 November
2009].
Review that questions the success of the novel.

—Patricia L. Kalayjian

h

Octavia Butler, Kindred

(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1979)

Octavia Estelle Butler, a decidedly unsentimental writer dubbed the “Black
Oracle” of science fiction/fantasy, was born in Pasadena, California, on 22 June
1947 but had roots in Louisiana. Her father, a shoe-shine man, died when she
was young, so Butler was raised by her mother, a domestic worker. Nicknamed
“Junie” as a child (short for Junior, perhaps, as her mother was also Octavia),