Book Reviews: Editor’s Note Summer Reading: The Fiction Issue Philip Kasinitz 1 Social scientists are not the only people whose work involves trying to get some truths about the social world down on paper. More than we generally acknowledge, we share this turf with novelists, playwrights, and other fiction writers. Indeed, we spend a lot of time in a largely unac- knowledged dialogue with these folks. We draw on their images and make use of their insights (I would like be able to say they draw on ours but, sadly, this is rarely the case). And, of course, we frequently assign works of fiction to our students—usually on the grounds that such work is more ‘‘accessible’’ than most social science, but really, I think, because fiction is often better than our own work in provoking students to examine, discuss, and think critically about social reality. Many sociologists—myself included—think about writing fiction from time to time. Of course, most of us never actually get up the nerve to try, and given the record of those who have, this is probably for the best. But the temptation is understandable. Our close cousins in anthropology have produced a well-regarded tradition of ‘‘ethnographic novels’’—think of Elenore Smith Bowen’s classic Return to Laughter or, more recently, Paul Stoller’s wonderful book Jaguar. In many ways these books cover the same intellectual territory as their author’s works of nonfiction, and yet by writing novels, the authors are free to tell us what they ‘‘know’’—or think they know—rather than only what they can prove. That is, of course, a tricky business. Good ethnographers are always skeptical about their own abilities to get inside the heads of the people they write about. Readers of ethnographic novels—even those written by great ethnogra- phers—always need to remember that they are, in fact, novels. Interest- ingly, qualitative sociologists rarely attempt this sort of thing. Part of the 1 City University of New York, Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10016-4309; e-mail: pkasinitz@gc.cuny.edu. Sociological Forum, Vol. 24, No. 2, June 2009 (Ó 2009) DOI: 10.1111/j.1573-7861.2009.1110a.x 457 0884-8971/09/0300-0031/0 Ó 2009 Eastern Sociological Society