A Note on Bleeding Edge’s “Unsheltered”

Abstract

The Bleeding Edge excerpt provided in the Fall 2013 Penguin Press catalogue notes that “[u]nhoused people sleep in doorways,”but by the time the Advanced Reading Copy had reached reviewers, “unhoused” had been changed to “unsheltered” (2), an edit that remained in place, even after other changes to the text, a couple of months later when the book became available for general readers. . . . We might ask: what significance is there to the edit? And from whose perspective are we seeing Maxine’s neighborhood in the opening of the novel? . . .  The edit actually distances the text from the only characters in the scene to whom we might attribute the perception of unsheltered people, Maxine and her children.