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In this issue Kimberly Nehls introduces us to a different way of learning about students’ college experiences and how these experiences shape their lives (Nehls, 2009). Nehls’s review of J. Courtney Smith’s novel Commencement demonstrates the insights into higher education that fiction can provide. As an anthropologist, I have found that novels represent a valuable form of ethnography, descriptions of cultural beliefs and practices. While scholarly studies of culture offer ethnographic descriptions in the analytic categories created by anthropologists or other scholars, novels take us into the lived experience of a culture through the interactions of individuals with their social world and through their thoughts, meanings, and understandings. Novels also depict well the emotional encounters and reactions associated with situations of daily life, an aspect of human experience that constraints of scholarly work generally cannot impart. One of the rewards of our current globalized existence is the easy availability of a vast amount of literature by novelists around the world, which take us into the minutia that comprise people’s lives, their struggles, aspirations, successes and disappointments, as well as the cultural frameworks through which they operate. Some recent examples of this world literature include Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss, which is set in northern India on the Indian side of the Himalayas and is the 2006 winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize; and Malaysian Tan Twang Eng’s The Gift of Rain (2008).

A Novel Window on the Academy: Commentary byLiesa Stamm, Contributing Editor