Kim Savelson's book, Where The World Is Not, has just been published by Ohio State University Press. In her book she investigates how novels that discuss invention and inventors engage with an array of critically important conversations and issues beyond invention and how we can trace such discourses and where they lead us.Savelson pursues these questions by examining how the resoundingly popular novels by Frank Norris, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ralph Ellison host the tug-of-war beyond thought and action, between the democratic agenda of the pragmatist movement and the aristocratic idea of aesthetics. Savelson argues for and reads these novels as a way of thinking through the meaning--and making of--"culture," a process that is fomented by the social revolution of democratic modernity. She thus expands the scope of the current work being done on pragmatism, as well as the work being done on literature and democracy, by carving out an intersection between these two fields.  Savelson demonstrates that these questions of invention, culture and democracy appeared at different key moments over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. These questions, she argues, both embody and deepen the struggle between the abstract and the political, the cultural and the commercial--a struggle that can best be described as a conflicted period of growth for modern democratic desire. In arguing this, she offers a historical recontextualization of selected literary texts, analyzing them as a way of thinking about intellectual history with subtlety and particularity.