Mark Fisher’s 2009 book Capitalist Realism introduces one of the most widely-discussed theoretical concepts of the past decade whose reach extends across disciplines and indeed beyond academia. But what is the value and utility of Fisher’s concept for studies of literary and novelistic realism? In addition to surveying the concept itself, this chapter gauges the specific possibilities and limitations of the concept, which is often deployed in the service of a broader cultural and sociopolitical diagnosis, for literary and novelistic studies. Critics have invoked Fisher’s concept in analyses ranging from collective politics to accelerationism, from discussions of contemporary culture to interrogations of utopian longing in Europe and North America today. And yet, in spite of – or more accurately due to – the term’s popularity, there exists a disjoint between phrase and substance that becomes particularly evident when we examine the conception of realism that the term and Fisher’s book in general contains. As we will see, in some ways surprisingly, asking “what’s the realism in capitalist realism?” is not as straightforward a question as one might expect.