Shortlisted, 2024 SHARP Book History Book Prize, Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing

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.

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

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

"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." - Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

"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." - The Complete Review

"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." - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"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." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"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." - Washington Post

"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." - Shelf Awareness

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

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

"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." - The New Republic

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

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

"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." - ASAP/Journal

"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." - Protean Magazine

"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." - Commonweal's Best Books of 2023

"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." - The Bulwark

"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." - Cleveland Review of Books

"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!" - Public Books

"[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." - Bookforum

"Recommended." - Choice Reviews

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

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

"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." - Full Stop

"“The Conglomerate Era” emerges as a new periodizing category capable of uniting blockbuster bestsellers, postmodernism, the rise and fall of brick-and-mortar bookstores, the expansion of creative-writing education, Oprah’s Book Club, philanthropic nonprofit lists, and the literary prize industrial complex." - Critical Inquiry

"A tour de force." - e-Rea (Revue électronique d'études sur le monde anglophone)

"If you’re interested in the history of book publishing in America, Big Fiction is indispensable. It’s brimming with well-researched information, entertaining anecdotes, and delightful tidbits of literary gossip." - The Arts Fuse

"In its engaging tone, comprehensive research, and bold vision for a literary study that is more attuned to the realities of literary production, Big Fiction is an essential contribution to an American literary history shaped by the forces of commerce, education, and government." - Journal of American Culture

"Throughout, Sinykin deftly interweaves archival finds with trade journal sources and interviews with a focus on narrating them engagingly....Sinykin’s book has already captured the attention of a wide readership in
academia and beyond." - American Studies