Metafiction has long been associated with the heyday of literary postmodernismwith a certain sense of irresponsibility political apathy or outright nihilism. Yet if as is now widely assumed postmodernism has finally run its course how might we account for the proliferation of metafictional devices in contemporary narrative media Does this persistence undermine the claim that postmodernism has passed or has the function of metafiction somehow changed To answer these questions Josh Toth considers a broad range of recent metafictional textsbywriters such as George Saunders and Jennifer Egan and directors such as Sofia Coppola and Quentin Tarantino. At the same time he traverses a diffuse theoretical landscape from the rise of various new materialisms in philosophy and the turn to affect in literary criticism to the seemingly endless efforts to name postmodernisms ostensible successor.