Big Fiction - (Literature Now) by Dan Sinykin

About the Book

Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author.

Book Synopsis

In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature--and literature itself--transformed.

Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry's daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction.

Big Fiction features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists--including E. L. Doctorow, Judith Krantz, Renata Adler, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick O'Brian, and Walter Mosley--as well as vivid portraits of industry figures. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.

Review Quotes

As a former bookseller, I appreciated seeing a scholar finally treat the aesthetic and material trends in the mass market fiction that sustains so much of the industry . . . the book paves the way for a more concrete form of literary criticism that is attentive to the world that produces literature without reproducing the generic distinctions that imprints and academics insist on.--Colin Lavery "Full Stop"

The fluency, anecdotes, and lightness with which Sinykin delivers what is clearly the product of rigorous research makes for a highly readable book.--Alice Grundy "Sydney Review of Books"

[A] blockbuster study.--Sarah Brouillette "Studies in the Novel"

Recommended.-- "Choice Reviews"

[Big Fiction] teaches us to see contemporary fiction as a field riven by contradiction: conglomeration is poisonous and generative, conservative and democratizing, a force of both austerity and abundance. And while it presents obstacles for nearly all writers, many--especially our best--have found unexpected sources of energy within it.--Mitch Therieau "Bookforum"

Dear Reader, you should read Big Fiction. It's the best treatment of why fiction is the way it is that I've ever read. And the stories too!--Clayton Childress "Public Books"

Big Fiction feels like a major contribution: to our understanding of contemporary literature and literary publishing as an industry, definitely; to literary criticism as a whole, probably; and maybe to our conception of how culture, in general, is made. It is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and clear-sighted cultural materialist analysis of the sort that feels almost verboten within the formal and professional fields of artistic production.--J. Arthur Boyle "Cleveland Review of Books"

Its unexpected novelty is what gives Sinykin's project its unique insights, making it a real contribution to our understanding of recent American literary history.--Adam Fleming Petty "The Bulwark"

This is the best kind of criticism: a book that told me things I didn't know . . . illuminated things I thought I knew . . . and made me want to argue back against some of its claims and descriptions.--Anthony Domestico "Commonweal's Best Books of 2023"

Big Fiction takes the notoriously exclusive and counterintuitive industry of U.S. book publishing and gives its recent history a lucid and unsparing treatment . . . [The book] makes for a demystifying and ultimately empowering read--one of particular value for anyone who feels shut out of the publishing milieu--and will help facilitate our understanding of the culture we have. That understanding is critical as we fight for the culture we want.--Emmerich Anklam "Protean Magazine"

Big Fiction's ambitious project and keen analysis will make it a classic in criticism of contemporary US fiction . . . The grand effect of this grand study is to halt any theorization of contemporary fiction that doesn't first consider the publishing landscape at that point in time.--Omid Bagherli "ASAP/Journal"

[A] lively, personality-driven, and original study.--Greg Barnhisel "Books & Review"

A fascinating combination of business history and academic literary analysis.--Morley Walker "Winnipeg Free Press"

Big Fiction is sharply written and sharply argued, part of a wave of cutting-edge works of literary history put out by Columbia University Press.--Scott W. Stern "The New Republic"

An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing.--Tyler Cowen "Marginal Revolution"

Full of cogent analysis, ambitious argument, juicy quotes from insiders and a demonstration of the central role of Catholics in American publishing.--Nick Ripatrazone "America Magazine: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture"

For some people, thrill rides are found at Disneyland. For certain types of readers, a thrill ride can be found in Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Dan Sinykin's scintillating take on the David and Goliath battle, in which free-spirited publishers fought to hold their own against corporate giants.--Nell Beram "Shelf Awareness"

Sinykin writes with verve and narrative flair as he documents the consolidation of the major publishing houses -- and, along the way, overturns the myth of "the romantic author," that lone genius unfettered by social circumstances or material constraints. . . . The result is a fascinating and informative account of the convulsions roiling the American publishing industry for the past half-century -- and a devastating reckoning with the ways in which conglomeration has altered American fiction.--Becca Rothfeld "Washington Post"

This book offers a rich, detailed background explicating the everyday reader's experience of why books published by big commercial presses seem so much like ... books big commercial presses would publish. . . . Any student of publishing would benefit from reading this book. In its pages, publishing seems fascinating and action-packed, but myths that readers might harbor about the industry's glamor, its sincerity, or the purity of its relationship to art will probably get dispelled.--Hilary Plum "Los Angeles Review of Books"

Big Fiction is a very ambitious book, and the story it tells is sweeping and persuasive. . . . It's the rare book of literary scholarship that may appeal to readers outside the academy.--Lee Konstantinou "The Chronicle of Higher Education"

Big Fiction provides a fascinating overview of American publishing over the past sixty or so years, with many interesting titbits about a large number of significant players and many notable publishing deals.--M.A. Orthofer "The Complete Review"

The two most remarkable things about Dan Sinykin's history of how corporate conglomeration in publishing has changed the course of literature are 1) it's never been written before and 2) there was a time, not so long ago, when the merging and acquisition of publishing houses was unthinkable. Sinykin teaches how to read "through a colophon," and that "our outsize attention to the author alone is a trick of history." Sinykin's fascinating history is underlineable on every page.--Spencer Ruchti "Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)"

Sinykin's Big Fiction is a book of major ambition and many satisfactions. Come for the comprehensive reframing of a key phase in U.S. literary history, stay for the parade of interesting people, the fascinating backstories of bestsellers, the electrically entertaining prose. The story of literary publishing in the postwar period has never been told with such verve.--Mark McGurl, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

This is the book we've all been waiting for. Now more than ever, it's important to grasp how the books that come to shape our imaginations and our understanding of the world are made. Sinykin's elegant prose and careful analysis pull the curtain back, allowing us new perspectives on book making, book selling, and book promoting. It turns out that everything we thought we knew is a big fiction.--Dana A. Williams, Howard University

Big Fiction tackles a big subject with deep research, great ambition, and broad mindedness. Sinykin pulls together stories of famous authors and obscure yet central behind-the-scenes players to tell the complex and compelling history of modern publishing. This is essential reading for anyone interested in the too-often-overlooked forces that shape what is published, what is written, and what the future of books might hold.--Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout

Revelatory . . . Book lovers curious about how the proverbial sausage gets made will want to check this out.-- "Publishers Weekly"

A "Most Anticipated" Book of 2023-- "The Millions"

In Big Fiction, Dan Sinykin tells the messy, sprawling story of American publishing in the postwar era through the voices and memories of many of its major figures--editors, agents, executives, authors--creating a rich cultural history any observer of the current literary scene will learn from. Through careful and incisive reading, he insists that books like Ragtime, Beloved, and Infinite Jest have much to tell us about the conditions under which they were published. Following through on Bakhtin's famous phrase--novels are the genre that represents "the zone of maximum content with the present"--Sinykin wants us to think of novels themselves as conglomerations, shaped by many influences, and in some cases by many hands. Big Fiction is provocative, smart, and disturbing; it deserves a big audience.--Jess Row, author of The New Earth and White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination

Ten years from now, Publishing Studies will be central to English departments, and Big Fiction will be a foundational text. Sinykin is precisely the critic I have been waiting for, with the intellectual range to bring rigor to the everyday processes by which publishing shapes how we write, read, and think.--Martin Riker, author of The Guest Lecture

About the Author

Dan Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in quantitative theory and methods. He is the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse (2020). His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Dissent, and other publications.