In the book’s afterword, I suggest that the period studied in this book has drawn to a close, as literary liberals have become both less interested in responding to postmodernism and more interested in rejecting free-market politics, including the centrist, communitarian version of this politics. To illustrate this shift, I compare texts published on either side of the 2008 financial crisis. In Then We Came to the End (2007), Joshua Ferris experiments with a collective first-person narrator in order to dramatize the tensions of office life, tensions which he figures in terms of the oppositions between elitism and egalitarianism and between sincerity and irony. Ferris’s self-reflexive interest in forging empathetic connections between workers, bosses, readers, and writers makes his novel a quintessential post-postmodern text. Philipp Meyer’s American Rust (2009) and Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009) by contrast, are precisely the kind of “angry” books “about work” that Ferris rejects. In formally distinct ways, both novels offer a political vision skeptical of centrism and committed to the irreducibility of class as a source of political and economic conflict.