Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic.

Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

You Are the Phenomenology is a cross-genre book—a blend of poetry, songs, lyric prose, and invented forms—that explores the everyday junctures of perception, compassion, and multiplicity. How might our powers of association create shared experiences without distorting the contexts from which those experiences emerge?

One of the volume's innovative forms is a poetic series called "Quadrilaterals"—four-line poems that present the reader with various ways to leap associative gaps:

Quadrilateral : Pinch in Your Heel

Soars the mackled sound, kites ago :
A Polish boy thinks with accordions, adopts a stammer :
When were we first older than we wanted to be :
That was our city, our chisel, the corbeil from which we ate.