Aimee Pozorski has written an encompassing, illuminating and passionate eye opener for readers enthralled by first- and second-hand memories of the tie-dyed sixties celebrated on t-shirts and by countless tribute bands or by the nostalgic, pastoral interstate-inspired dreams that fueled "white flight" to hastily erected suburbs a decade earlier. Sex, Drugs, and Gentrification shows in detail how the novelists, poets, playwrights, autobiographers, and ethnographers whose work Pozorski discusses expose and explain what Pozorski describes as "uncovered significant knowledge gaps" about displacement, addiction, and inequality in the U.S. during the decades beginning with and following the Great Depression and the Great Migration. Along with several of the texts Pozorski examines, Sex, Drugs and Gentrification calls upon readers to bear "counterwitness" to numerous depredations of governments and private capital in afflicting millions of our fellow Americans. By demonstrating how literary studies offer a vital form of muckraking, Pozorski's work seems destined to join a sub-canon that includes works like Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives, Michael Gold's Jews Without Money, Langston Hughes's "Ballad of the Landlord," and Michael Harrington's The Other America.

James D. Bloom, Emeritus Professor of English & American Studies, Muhlenberg College, USA

This is a ground-breaking study that redefines trauma studies. Pozorski's analysis of a wide range of literary texts from the last hundred years in the context of urban discrimination and displacement is cogent, compelling and always informed by a keen sense of what is at stake ethically, as well as aesthetically. This is a wonderful, timely book that should be read by anyone interested in how American cities and neighbourhoods have been transformed and deformed by gentrification and how American writers have represented and responded to this process.

David Brauner, Professor of Contemporary Literature, University of Reading, UK

Aimee Pozorski provides a rich and provocative take on the concept of 'urban crisis' through treating the discontents of the contemporary American social landscape consisting in the trauma of homelessness, and abject neglect of those mired in drugs and sex work. Theoretically nuanced and drawing from canonical and popular literature, this book with its well historicised debates will appeal as much to the intelligent lay reader as to experts in human sciences.

Gurumurthy Neelakantan, Professor of English, Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India

With her new book Sex, Drugs and Gentrification in American Literature, Aimee Pozorski ranges ambitiously across diverse genres, periods and U.S. cities to make a powerful and persuasive argument about “housing trauma” as a driving yet underexamined force in the development of 20th- and 21st-century American literature. Through sensitive and compelling close readings of works by Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Philip Roth, Yaa Gyasi and Tommy Orange, amongst many other writers, Pozorski breaks new ground through her original interpretations of both classic and lesser-known texts, her bold rethinking of their approach to “gentrification,” and her welcome interrogation of the limits of Western trauma theory. With its many insights and deep research, this monograph will be vital reading for scholars working across multiple fields and disciplines.

Ruth Maxey, Associate Professor of Modern American Literature, University of Nottingham, UK

This is an excellently compiled work, weaving a strong argumentative thread through a myriad of locations, time periods, and texts. The application of trauma theory to the subjects at hand, along with the analogies made to other traumas like 9/11, make for compelling reading. Aimee Pozorski addresses timely social issues through the important lens of literature and its impacts in terms of trauma recognition, prioritizing trauma, yet not omitting significant aspects of the economic and political implications of gentrification, urban dislocation, and social fragmentation.

Andy Connolly, Associate Professor, City University of New York, USA