Do we need to save fiction from conglomerate publishing?

Literature is, variously: a refuge from reality, an encounter with an era, an expression of a singular sensibility and a sheer delight. But it is also a business, as Dan Sinykin, an English professor at Emory University, explains in his new monograph, “Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature.”

Many academics are clinical prose stylists, but 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. Far from working in isolation, he argues, writers inhabit a “hidden world” of “subsidiary rights specialists, art directors, marketing managers, sales staff, wholesalers, chain book buyers, philanthropists, government bureaucrats.” In “Big Fiction,” these shadowy figures, so central yet so uncelebrated, slink out of the wings and onto the stage. 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.

Still, sentimental and naive as I am, I cannot quite shake the conviction that literature is more than an emanation of economic circumstance. For all its fragility and susceptibility to material degradation, it continues to strike me as a member of that endangered and embattled species: art.

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