Some of the hottest writers of the 90's shared a subversive aesthetic sensibility, "avant-pop, " that drew on the forms, images, slogans, characters, and narrative archetypes of our multidimensional, information-dense culture-cartoons, films, music videos, advertising, and rock music-to explore and critically examine that culture. Each of these thirty-two works delves into the deeper metaphorical implications of this pop cultural imagery to convey a turn toward overstimulation and hyper-consumption in American life, and to explore issues of personality and identity. This provocative, stylistically experimental work is truly literature for the twenty-first century.