Stories of twins are told with astonishing frequency in contemporary culture. Films and novels from recent decades repeatedly tell of the stranglehold of brotherly love, the evil twin who steals her sister's lover, the homicidal mutant twin on a rampage, the reunion of twins separated at birth, twins divided by national borders, and confusion between look-alike twins. Critics tend to view twin tales as a subset of the literature of the double, in decline since the nineteenth century. A closer look at recent examples, however, reveals patterns of genre and gender quite specific to our time. Why do we keep telling twin tales? And how are we telling them differently from previous generations?