A review by gregbrown
The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl

4.0

An awesome book if you're already interested in the premise: exploring most of 20th century American literature through the lens of the creative writing program, and how many can be easily and beneficially understood as reactions to that program. However, it's a rough ask if you aren't, since the chapters are incredibly long—up to 70 pages in length—and constitute a free-flowing narrative on the different elements of creative writing programs and how they're instantiated in up to a dozen cases each chapter. If you think you might be interested, I'd first recommend reading the unexpectedly-large amount of reaction commentary in "mainstream" lit journals: n+1, London Review of Books, and even the New Yorker.

A pretty rad book all told, but not quite rad enough or well-constructed enough to recommend to a general audience.