Book excerpt: This book explores how Canada is imagined primarily by US writers, and what readers and scholars on both sides of the Canada-US border can learn from these recent depictions by examining a selection of US-authored fiction from 9/11 to the present. The novels — and occasionally paintings, films, and musicals — that are the subject of the book provide a deliberately varied set of case studies to probe how US texts, along with works of art produced on both sides of the Canada-US border, uncover moments in Canadian historical and literary studies that have been buried or occluded to protect Canada's self-representation as an exceptional nation.