Discusses how much otherness is acceptable, as opposed to how much is excessive, disruptive, and disturbing

The Deliverance of Others is a compelling reappraisal of the idea that narrative literature can expand readers' empathy. What happens if, amid the voluminous influx of otherness facilitated by globalization, we continue the tradition of valorizing literature for bringing the lives of others to us, admitting them into our world and valuing the difference that they introduce into our lives? In this new historical situation, are we not forced to determine how much otherness is acceptable, as opposed to how much is excessive, disruptive, and disturbing?

The influential literary critic David Palumbo-Liu suggests that we can arrive at a sense of responsibility toward others by reconsidering the discourses of sameness that deliver those unlike ourselves to us. Through virtuoso readings of novels by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ruth Ozeki, he shows how notions that would seem to offer some basis for commensurability between ourselves and others—ideas of rationality, the family, the body, and affect—become less stable as they try to accommodate more radical types of otherness. For Palumbo-Liu, the reading of literature is an ethical act, a way of thinking through our relations to others.

"“Palumbo-Liu makes a persuasive case that the novel — as a self-conscious delivery system in its own right — offers a critical means for registering both the effects and the ‘affects’ of the new global delivery systems that connect us. In posing this ethical power as a problem for the global age, The Deliverance of Others renews our sense of literature’s profound importance for how we come to know others and ourselves.”" - Los Angeles Review of Books

"“Literature offers us a thick description of experience; certainly, a realistic literature makes no apology for this, and Palumbo-Liu pushes his formidable inquiry and sensitivity into this bramble patch. . . . The Deliverance of Others delves into the relationship amongst individual, society, cultures, economies, and civilizations. In its ambassadorial role, literature brings both self and ‘other’ before the eyes — and self encompasses both protagonist (as a nuanced, yet complex figure) and reader (as a representative of a given cultural sensibility).”" - Key Reporter

"“Palumbo-Liu precisely uses his ethical obligation in literary readings to bring to us The Deliverance of Others. This is an influential book which belongs on every shelf that wrestles with understanding the politics of difference, marginality and Otherness."" - Rocky Mountain Review

"“Palumbo-Liu’s remarkable book goes some way toward answering a question we must take seriously and debate vigorously in the very specific conditions of the twenty-first-century attack on the humanities that also forms part of our current global age: that of why we should read literature at all.”" - College Literature

"“[A] fine new book. . . . expertly done, and the range of material covered—from cloning to Facebook, from mass media to close textual reading—is highly impressive.”" - Cultural Studies Review

"In an era when discussions of the role of the humanities are invariably accompanied by a sense of crisis, The Deliverance of Others is a timely reminder and bold defense of the value of literature, brimming with the conviction that an ethical globalism is indeed possible and that the path to it winds through the contemporary novel." - Novel