Finance Fictions takes the measure of what it means to live in a world ruled by high finance by examining the tension between psychosis and realism that plays out in the contemporary finance novel. When the things traded at the center of the economy cease to be things at all, but highly abstracted speculations, how do we come to see the real? What sorts of narrative can accurately approach the actual workings of a neoliberal economy marked by accelerating cycles of market crashes, economic and political crisis, and austerity? Revisiting such twentieth-century classics of the genre as Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, De Boever argues that the twenty-first century is witnessing the birth of a new kind of realistic novel that can make sense of complex financial instruments like collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and digital algorithms operating at speeds faster than what human beings or computers can record. If in 1989 Wolfe could still urge novelists to work harder to “tame the billion-footed beast of reality,” today’s economic reality confronts us with a difference that is qualitative rather than quantitative: a new financial ontology requiring new modes of thinking and writing. Mobilizing the philosophical thought of Quentin Meillassoux in the close reading of finance novels by Robert Harris, Michel Houellebecq, Ben Lerner and less well-known works of conceptual writing such as Mathew Timmons’ Credit, Finance Fictions argues that realism is in for a speculative update if it wants to take on the contemporary economy—an “if” whose implications turn out to be deeply political. Part literary study and part philosophical inquiry, Finance Fictions seeks to contribute to a new mindset for creative and critical work on finance in the twenty-first century.

Find out what Joseph Conrad, Arthur Miller, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Mark Twain can tell you about being a more effective manager. Looking for business insights? Forget the Wall Street Journal. You can learn a lesson or two from Arthur Miller and David Mamet. Put down Forbes and Fortune for once and spend an evening with Chaucer and George Bernard Shaw. Not only will you enjoy yourself, you're also likely to discover some fresh management perspectives and ideas! Written by a former CEO of a global corporation who has also been an English literature professor, this provocative new business book proves that great novels and plays are a rich, untapped resource for businesspeople looking for solutions to problems they confront on the job. Robert A. Brawer digs deeply into fictions by literary legends such as Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Joseph Heller to unearth vital lessons that managers can readily apply to the real world of work. From tips on resolving office conflicts in James Thurber's "The Catbird Seat" to pointers on gaining client confidence found in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Brawer finds nuggets of business wisdom in places where most businesspeople never think of looking. Focusing mainly on fiction that explores business themes, Brawer uses Heller's Something Happened and Shaw's Major Barbara to illustrate the dangers of allowing excessive faith in corporate hype to impair a manager's ability to accurately assess serious problems. From Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and Dreiser's Sister Carrie, he infers important lessons about the art of salesmanship. He explores the problems of alienation and maintaining personal integrity in a corporate world through a close reading of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit. And out of his analysis of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and John Dos Passos's The Big Money, among other major nineteenth- and twentieth-century works, Brawer develops an inspiring discourse on self-interest and efficiency versus ethical responsibility and compassion in a Darwinian business world. As instructive as it is entertaining, Fictions of Business shows you how to take advantage of great novels and plays in solving the human problems of management. Praise for Fictions of Business "What a fabulous concept: the bringing together of great literature and management theory. This is a business book that challenges the intellect and goes about unveiling the basic principles of management in a way that forces you to think about what you know in a completely different way. It's a business book that stays with you long after you've read it." -Shelly Lazarus, Chairman and CEO, Ogilvy & Mather "A truly refreshing contribution to the multitude of books on corporate management. Brawer has cleverly crafted a set of essays that are both inspirational and practical." -Robert A. Kavesh, Professor of Finance and Economics, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University. "Robert Brawer is both a successful entrepreneur and a distinguished literary scholar, and his book, Fictions of Business, is wise about both trade and fiction. Brawer writes with ironic wit and sharp observation about the culture of the corporation and the workplace." -Martin Peretz, Editor-in-Chief, The New Republic and Professor of Social Studies, Harvard University. "Brawer's message is clear and true: good literature enriches business leaders, making them more productive in their careers." -Richard D. Franke, former Chairman and CEO, John Nuveen Company. "Although commerce and literary analysis might seem worlds apart, Robert Brawer's book brilliantly weaves together fictional characters with larger-than-life figures from the corporate world. In Brawer's compelling narrative, literature offers striking models for good corporate practice." -Philip Gossett, Dean of Humanities, University of Chicago.

A bold, epic debut novel set during the war and financial crisis that defined the beginning of our century One September morning in 2008, an investment banker approaching forty, his career in collapse and his marriage unraveling, receives a surprise visitor at his West London townhouse. In the disheveled figure of a South Asian male carrying a backpack, the banker recognizes a long-lost friend, a mathematics prodigy who disappeared years earlier under mysterious circumstances. The friend has resurfaced to make a confession of unsettling power. In the Light of What We Know takes us on a journey of exhilarating scope--from Kabul to London, New York, Islamabad, Oxford, and Princeton--and explores the great questions of love, belonging, science, and war. It is an age-old story: the friendship of two men and the betrayal of one by the other. The visitor, a man desperate to climb clear of his wrong beginnings, seeks atonement; and the narrator sets out to tell his friend's story but finds himself at the limits of what he can know about the world--and, ultimately, himself. Set against the breaking of nations and beneath the clouds of economic crisis, this surprisingly tender novel chronicles the lives of people carrying unshakable legacies of class and culture as they struggle to tame their futures. In an extraordinary feat of imagination, Zia Haider Rahman has telescoped the great upheavals of our young century into a novel of rare intimacy and power.

Fiction, including novels, plays, and films, can be a powerful force in educating students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. Works of fiction can address a range of issues and topics, provide detailed real-life descriptions of the organizational contexts in which workers find themselves, and tell interesting, engaging, and memorable stories that are richer and more likely to stay with the reader or viewer longer than lectures and other teaching approaches. For these reasons, Exploring Capitalist Fiction: Business through Literature and Film analyzes 25 films, novels, and plays that engage the theories, concepts, and issues most relevant to the business world. Through critical examinations of works such as Atlas Shrugged and Wall Street, Younkins shows how fiction is a powerful teaching tool to sensitize business students without business experience and to educate and train managers in real businesses.

The way we conceptualise the economy and ourselves as homo economicus has profound consequences for our lives. The contributions to this anthology take debates about the financial crisis, about recent austerity measures or about the Brexit referendum a step further. A common denominator of these dynamics are underlying ideas of »the economy«. Each author identifies a facet of Britain's imagined economies. They connect seemingly separate fields such as finance and fiction in order to better understand current political changes. In addition, the book offers an urgently needed interdisciplinary view on the performative power of economic thought - and in this respect moves far beyond merely British perspectives.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Grisham meets Ludlum on Wall Street . . . a fast-paced roller coaster of love and lust, murder and betrayal, politics and business.”—USA Today “Entertaining and energetic . . . superbly taut . . . Frey keeps up the suspense right to the end.”—Financial Times Investment banker Andrew Falcon is spearheading the biggest hostile takeover in Wall Street history—and counting on a staggering five-million-dollar fee if he can pull it off. But Falcon doesn't realize that he has stumbled onto the secret power of a shadowy organization known only as The Sevens. He discovers a scheme so interwoven in financial and political sabotage, so vast and brilliantly designed, that it staggers the imagination. His only chance to stop it depends on taking overwhelming risks—and learning which of the two beautiful women in his life can be trusted. Andrew Falcon's struggle for survival begins as he tries to outwit his betrayers—and a hidden enemy whose hatred is implacable.

Based on readings of some of the leading literary voices in contemporary Irish writing, this book explores how these authors have engaged with the events of Ireland's recent economic 'boom' and the demise of the Celtic Tiger period, and how they have portrayed the widespread and contrasting aftermaths. Drawing upon economic literary criticism, affect theory in relation to shame and guilt, and the philosophy of debt, this book offers an entirely original suit of perspectives on both established and emerging authors. Through analyses of the work of writers including Donal Ryan, Anne Haverty, Claire Kilroy, Dermot Bolger, Deirdre Madden, Chris Binchy, Peter Cunningham, Justin Quinn, and Paul Murray, author Eóin Flannery illuminates their formal and thematic concerns. Paying attention to generic and thematic differences, Flannery's analyses touch upon issues such as: the politics of indebtedness; temporality and narrative form; the relevance of affect theory to understandings of Irish culture and society in an age of austerity; and the relationship between literary fiction and the mechanics of high finance. Insightful and original, Form, Affect and Debt in Post-Celtic Tiger Irish Fiction provides a seminal intervention in trying to grasp the cultural context and the literature of the Celtic Tiger period and its wake.

The Long 1980s could be summed up handily in the annals of U.S. cultural history with the enduring markers of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, and Dire Straits's hit single "Money for Nothing." Despite their vast differences, each serves to underscore the confidence, jingoism, and optimism that powered the U.S. economy throughout the decade. Mining a wide range of literature, film, and financial print journalism, Scandals and Abstraction chronicles how American society's increasing concern with finance found expression in a large array of cultural materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism. The ever-present credit cards, monetary transactions, and ATMs in Don De Lillo's White Noise open this study as they serve as touchstones for its protagonist's sense of white masculinity and ground the novel's narrative form. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone's Wall Street animate a subsequent chapter, as each is considered in light of the 1987 stock market crash and held up as a harbinger of a radical new realism that claimed a narrative monopoly on representing an emergent financial era. These works give way to the pornographic excess and violence of Bret Easton Ellis's epochal American Psycho, which is read alongside the popular 1980s genre of the financial autobiography. With a series of trenchant readings, La Berge argues that Ellis's novel can be best understood when examined alongside Ivan Boesky's Merger Mania, Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens's Boone. A look at Jane Smiley's Good Faith and its plot surrounding the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, concludes the study, and considers how financial reportage became a template for much of our current writing about of finance. Drawing on a diverse archive of novels, films, autobiographies, and journalism, Scandals and Abstraction provides a timely study of the economy's influence on fiction, and outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism became more canonical, realism became more postmodern, and finance became a distinct cultural object.

Public credit was controversial in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. It entailed new ways of thinking about the individual in relation to the State and was for many reasons a site of cultural negotiation and debate. At the same time, it required commitment from participants in order to function. Some of the debates relating to public credit, whose success was tied up in the way it was represented, find their way into contemporary fiction – in particular the eighteenth-century novel. This book reads eighteenth-century fiction alongside works of political economy in order to offer a new perspective on credible commitment and the rise of a credit economy facilitated by public credit. Works by authors such as Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Frances Burney are explored alongside lesser-known fictional texts, including some early it-narratives and novels of sensibility, to give a fully rounded view of the perception of public credit within England and its wider cultural and social implications. Strategies for representing public credit, the book argues, can be seen as contributing to the development of the English novel, a type of fiction whose emphasis on the individual can also be read as helping to produce a certain type of person, the modern financial subject. This interdisciplinary book draws from economic history and literary/cultural studies in order to make connections between the development of finance and an important facet of modern Western culture, the novel.

The universal lament about money is that there is never enough. We spend endless hours trying to figure out ways to stretch every dollar and kicking ourselves whenever we spend too much or save too little. For all the stress and effort we put into every choice, why are most of us unhappy about our finances? According to Laura Vanderkam, the key is to change your perspective. Instead of looking at money as a scarce resource, consider it a tool that you can use creatively to build a better life for yourself and the people you care about. Drawing on the latest happiness research as well as the stories of dozens of real people, Vanderkam offers a contrarian approach that forces us to examine our own beliefs, goals, and values.