The notion of “happily ever after” has been ingrained in many of us since childhood—meet someone, date, have the big white wedding, and enjoy your well-deserved future. But why do we buy into this idea? Is love really all we need? Author Laurie Essig invites us to flip this concept of romance on its head and see it for what it really is—an ideology that we desperately cling to as a way to cope with the fact that we believe we cannot control or affect the societal, economic, and political structures around us. From climate change to nuclear war, white nationalism to the worship of wealth and conspicuous consumption—as the future becomes seemingly less secure, Americans turn away from the public sphere and find shelter in the private. Essig argues that when we do this, we allow romance to blind us to the real work that needs to be done—building global movements that inspire a change in government policies to address economic and social inequality.

"A Very Minor Prophet" is the story of how Barth Flynn, a barista swimming upstream against purposelessness in Portland, Oregon, becomes the faithful scribe of Joseph Patrick Booker. Booker is a dwarf preacher who serves Voodoo donuts, Stumptown coffee, and, while his congregation throws PBR cans at him, rants about George W. Bush during the height of the 2004 presidential election. BarthOCOs Portland is a world of bikes, zines, and cheap beer, but itOCOs also a confined world, full of the desperate search to find meaning. In this lonely setting, Barth passes time learning trivial details, like the dozens of Gaelic words for rain. During BarthOCOs quest for human connection, he meets the passionate Booker, who sees light in the gray world and strives to help people think and believe in something and to find connections with each other. BarthOCOs fascination with Booker becomes a friendship that comes to define his life, as he discovers himself, his city, and his budding feelings for an enigmatic bike messenger who helps distribute BookerOCOs gospel in the form of zines. "A Very Minor Prophet" is a comic novel, a gospel, an ode to great coffee, a story of great friendship, great love, and of a man waking up in Portland, Oregon, to realize his life and his story is just beginning."

"Boy meets girl. Boy proposes to girl. Girl refuses proposal. Then what?This provocative scenario provides the frame for a significant countertradition in popular nineteenth-century women's novels: the double-proposal plot, in which the heroine rejects and later accepts proposals from the same suitor. Exploring the American wing of this movement through the novels of Carolyn Hentz, Augusta Evans, Laura J. Curtis Bullard, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Karen Tracey investigates how each of these writers is constrained by her historical circumstances and how she uses her fiction to critique those circumstances.Pioneered in Britain by Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the double-proposal plot dislodges the myth of Mr. Right and questions the all-powerful notions of true love and happily-ever-after. When the heroine rejects her suitor's initial proposal, she opens up the possibility of renegotiating the terms of the relationship and exploring alternative roles. By considering two possible marriages between the same set of partners, the double-proposal plot interrogates the role of middle-class women in courtship and in public life as well as the quality of married life and the influence a woman potentially brings to it. Tracey charts the genre's evolution from novels that seek answers within renegotiated marriages to those that challenge the efficacy of marriage itself. Reconstructing some of the cultural circumstances that would have influenced the writing, publishing, and reading of the novels, Plots and Proposals examines how changing notions of love and romance both inform and are critiqued by this renegade fiction."