Patrick O'Donnell is Professor of English at Michigan State University, USA. He has taught at the University of Arizona, West Virginia University (where he was the Eberly Family Distinguished Professor of American Literature), and Purdue University (where he was editor of MFS: Modern Fiction Studies). He has also taught at several international universities, including the Université de Bordeaux III in France, the Universität Tübingen and the Universität Stuttgart (as Senior Fulbright Professor) in Germany, and Radboud University Nijmegen (as Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Literature) in the Netherlands. He is the author or editor of 12 books, including The American Novel Now: Contemporary American Fiction Since 1980 (Blackwell, 2010), Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Duke University Press, 2000) and The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century American Fiction (co-edited with David W. Madden & Justus Nieland, Blackwell, 2011).