Publishers Weekly
08/14/2023
This rich analysis by Emory University English professor Sinykin (American Literature and the Long Downturn) traces how corporate consolidation has affected the book publishing industry. He suggests that the post-WWII rise in college graduates and inexpensive mass market books made the 1950s and ’60s boom times for book publishing’s bottom line, sparking interest from large corporations in buying up the “small and privately held” publishers—Random House, for instance, became in 1959 “the first major house to go public and used the influx of cash to acquire Knopf in 1960” before both were purchased by RCA in 1965. A downturn in book sales in the late ’70s led publishing’s new corporate owners to prioritize cheaply produced genre fiction titles by brand-name authors to secure returns on their investment. Sinykin sometimes succumbs to academic jargon (“One version of the epiphenomenal author is the romantic author’s obverse”), but his insights into how the corporatization of publishing has contributed to some of its most persistent flaws are revelatory: For instance, he suggests that requiring editors to justify prospective acquisitions by comparing them to “similar titles that had sold well” created a feedback loop in which editors passed on books by authors of color because there weren’t many titles to compare them to. Book lovers curious about how the proverbial sausage gets made will want to check this out. (Oct.)
Nick Ripatrazone Magazine: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture
Full of cogent analysis, ambitious argument, juicy quotes from insiders and a demonstration of the central role of Catholics in American publishing.
Becca Rothfeld
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.
Los Angeles Review of Books - Hilary Plum
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.
The Millions
A "Most Anticipated" Book of 2023
Shelf Awareness - Nell Beram
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.
The Complete Review - M.A. Orthofer
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.
Sydney Review of Books - Alice Grundy
The fluency, anecdotes, and lightness with which Sinykin delivers what is clearly the product of rigorous research makes for a highly readable book.
Choice Reviews
Recommended.
The Chronicle of Higher Education - Lee Konstantinou
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.
Third Place Books (Seattle, WA) - Spencer Ruchti
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.
The Bulwark - Adam Fleming Petty
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.
Protean Magazine - Emmerich Anklam
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.
Bookforum - Mitch Therieau
[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.
Marginal Revolution - Tyler Cowen
An excellent history of U.S. trade publishing.
The New Republic - Scott W. Stern
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.
Mark McGurl
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.
Cleveland Review of Books - J. Arthur Boyle
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.
Winnipeg Free Press - Morley Walker
A fascinating combination of business history and academic literary analysis.
Studies in the Novel - Sarah Brouillette
[A] blockbuster study.
Lincoln Michel
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.
Books & Review - Greg Barnhisel
[A] lively, personality-driven, and original study.
ASAP/Journal - Omid Bagherli
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.
Jess Row
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.
Dana A. Williams
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.
Public Books - Clayton Childress
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!
Anthony Domestico's Best Books of 2023
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.
Martin Riker
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.
Commonweal's Best Books of 2023 - Anthony Domestico
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.
America Magazine: The Jesuit Review of Faith & Culture - Nick Ripatrazone
Full of cogent analysis, ambitious argument, juicy quotes from insiders and a demonstration of the central role of Catholics in American publishing.
