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Friends,
I love reading and I love buying books. I’ve come to learn that those are two separate pursuits, but both are highly mediated by forces that are unseen to most of us, even if we’re writers or avid readers.
How was the literary landscape in America formed?
Why are there so few big publishers not owned by multinational corporations?
How do those merges affect what we read and how genres are created?
Why do so many prize-winning novels suck?
I wanted to get a handle on all of this, so I invited Professor of English and scholar of books and publishing, DAN SINYKIN onto the show!
Dan is the author of the excellent book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.You might think this bookis just a niche concern, but it’s a page-turner, filled not just with theories, but name-dropping, gossip, surprising turns of history, and determined individuals. It also an important book for writers to read.
I hope this episode gives you a better view of the infernal… or, okay, at least crazy Rube Golberg-esque inner workings of a favorite activity.
MORE ON DAN
Dan’s website is here. Dan is aso the author of American Literature and the Long Downturn: Neoliberal Apocalypse and many scholarly articles, including his essay on Danielle Steele (who features in Big Fiction in a big way). He’s also hard at work on a new book about close reading, which I am very excited for.
Conner Habib 