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.