Book Review: The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction by Alison Shonkwiler

In The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, Alison Shonkwiler argues that the growing abstraction of contemporary capitalism has demanded the emergence of new imaginative conceptions of ‘the real’: what she terms ‘financial realism’. This timely book shows how the novel can be a tool for revealing the hidden workings and circulation of finance capital to provide counter-narratives to the abstractions of late capitalism, writes Rebecca Liu.