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Dan Sinykin

Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature Audio CD – Unabridged, June 25 2024

by Dan Sinykin (Author), Mike Lenz (Contributor, Reader)

31 ratings

3.8 on Goodreads

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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. This deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.

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Print length

1 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Tantor Audio
Publication date

June 25 2024
Dimensions

17.15 x 17.46 x 2.54 cm
ISBN-13

979-8874839581

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Product description

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. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, Dissent, and other publications.

Mike Lenz has been an audiobook narrator and voice actor for more than fourteen years. Having narrated titles in genres ranging from fiction, entertainment, science, and children's literature to Christian, business, self-help, and history, Mike loves bringing nonfiction and fiction stories to life with his engaging, confident, and trustworthy voice. Mike's broad background includes voicing commercials, eLearning projects, real estate videos, corporate and web-based videos, and brand imaging, appearing in regional and national television commercials as an on-camera talent, and serving as the mayor of his hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York. Mike is also a Voice Arts Award-nominated podcast producer as well as an author. He is a frequent speaker at learning and voice-over conferences. Mike currently lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, with his wife and four children.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0D6NS6D6K
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tantor Audio
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 25 2024
Edition ‏ : ‎ Unabridged
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 1 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 979-8874839581
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 230 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 17.15 x 17.46 x 2.54 cm
�鶹�� Rank: #20 in History of Books
- #76 in Book Publishing (Books)
- #140 in Literary Movements & Periods
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31 ratings

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Rafe Cruz Smith
Literary manufactured consent or the Consensus International Committee (CIA)
Reviewed in the United States on July 18, 2025
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A well-researched academic book which provides laypeople with a well-argued thesis about literary text production and how bestsellers and styles of literature (Modernism, minimalism, baroque, Southern style) are promoted and manufactured through gatekeepers of literary critics, publishing houses and magazines; authors are promoted and processed according to the bottom line—the profit margin. The reader public is led by the collar as to which authors win the awards and which publishing houses gets the biggest winners. It’s capitalism at its best. Working class writers don’t stand a chance.

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Charles Hargreaves
Wonderful!
Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2025
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I was working at Knopf in the early 90s, when book publishing was in popular resurgence. This book captures all the excitement of a wonderful time, the advent of new literary fiction in paperback, the editors as cultural stars, and the wonderful parties. Anyone interested in the history of book publishing, and in the joy of the 1990s publishing scene, will find this hugely satisfying.

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Aaron
How Conglomeration shaped U.S. fiction from mass markets to small presses
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2023
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This is an outstanding book. It offers a lively, engaging overview of structural changes in the U.S. publishing industry over the last sixty years, punctuated with memorable sketches of representative figures, the authors, editors, agents, booksellers and publishers who shaped and navigated the industry's changing terrain: Danielle Steel, E.L. Doctorow, Alberto Vitale, Andre Schiffrin, many others—it's a long list. At book's end, there's a helpful glossary of publishing figures that runs to fifteen pages.

Sinykin tracks how the industry's racial and class homogeneity persists through all the transformations, adding dimension to the central arguments of Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture and building on the work of others in the growing body of literary sociology. It’s an ambitious, valuable advance in the field for scholars of contemporary US lit, but it’s accessible and of interest to a general readership.

For me, what gives the book lingering force are the moments when Sinykin connects these structural changes to aesthetic formations all along the bibliographic spectrum—formulaic mass market, the "masked technicity" of middlebrow titles, the rise of autofiction and historical fiction, and the survival of more experimental work in the world outside the big five publishers with non-profits like Graywolf, Coffee House Press, Dalkey Archive. Sinykin makes the case that, though these presses are driven less by sales imperatives than the big five, they answer to material interests as well (the social interests rewarded by NEA and Mellon grants), and they define themselves against the world of conglomeration so assiduously that they become its unwitting shadow.

The book is at its most satisfying in exploring this seam of mirrored aesthetics, as when it spotlights large-scale differences in the language of Random House and small press novels or when it shows how generational talents like Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita navigated past the sterility of middlebrow conglomerate authorship and the platitudes of 90s multiculturalism with triumphant results.

Strongly recommended.

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