Current nonfiction authors and books. The latest book reviews. And well talk about the current nonfree asian books featured on cspans book tv. And welcome to about books. In a few minutes, well talk about the late novelist Cormac Mccarthy and how his career was nurtured by the Publishing Industry and whether that could still be the case today. But first, heres some of the latest news from the publishing world. Well, part of a new arkansas law restricting what books are available to children has been blocked by a federal judge. The law would have made it a criminal offense to distribute or provide materials deemed, quote, harmful to minors. Libraries in arkansas and the state. Aclu had challenged the law on 14th amendment and First Amendment grounds. In his ruling, the Us District Court judge timothy brooks included a line from the novel fahrenheit 451, which of course depicts a dystopian future where oks are banned. Quote, there is more than one way to bura book. The judge wrote, and the world is full of people running around with lit matches. And the Washington Times reports at republican senator marco rubio of florida and other members of congress are concerned that fedalax dollars have beenfor censoring a conservative christian Childrens Book author. The members of cs recently otto the head of the institute of museum and library services, which receives tax dollars to ensure that author Kirk Camerons publisher, brave books, is not blocked from ing events at publicly supported libraries. And finally, a reminder that the library of Congress National book festival is coming up on august 12th here in washington, d. C. , the daylong fr event ll feature more than 70 authors this yr. And aseve done since the first National Book festival back in00 one booktv on cspan two will be live all day from the festival. And now a discussion with Emory University english professor dan sinykin about the life and literary career of Cormac Mccarthy. Mr. Sinicki sat down recently with book peters one and now joining us from Emory University in atlanta is professor dan sinykin. Heres his guest essay in the New York Times in june. Quote, Cormac Mccarthy had a remarkable literary career. It could never happen now. Professor, why do you say that . Cormac mccarthys career could not happen now. Well, his career depended on a situation in publishing that no longer exists. He required a editor at random house. Albert erskine was a tremendous editor who worked with some of the giant figures of 20th century literature. In addition to mccarthy. He needed mccarthy needed erskine to support him through a series of books that were commercial failures. His first five books over more than 20 years. Sold only a few thousand copies each and went out of print. Thats not something that is sustainable at commercial publishers in the 21st century. And why is it that Albert Erskine stuck with mr. Mccarthy . Did he see something . Were these books badly written . No, the books are beautifully written. Mccarthys his early books as his late books are all beautifully written, even though theres a big divide, a big difference between the two halves of his career. But his early books are all, all brilliant. I love them. Erskine saw genius in them. Erskine was the last editor for william faulkner. Actually. And mccarthys early books are quite indebted to faulkner and faulkners style. So when mccarthys first manuscript came across the transom at random house and mccarthy sent it to random house, he sent a what i found in the archives described as a poorly typed manuscript of his first novel. He just sent it into random house. He addressed as envelope to random house and eventually the manuscript reached erskines desk. Erskine had read the manuscript and he saw something that he recognized from faulkner, something in the style that that spoke to him in a similar way. And he thought, heres a writer that has something special. And so he worked with mccarthy through that first book, through the next several books. And in each of them, he thought these books were great, and he thought they deserved a major audience. And a big reception. And he worked erskine worked to help mccarthy continue to write by using erskines own networks with writers like robert penn, warren, ralph ellison, saul bellow, and many others to get mccarthy fellowships and foundation prizes, including macarthur genius grant. Mccarthy was one of the inaugural first winners of the first macarthur genius grants in 1981. Erskine had played a major role in getting mccarthy all of this support so that he could survive as a writer for 25, 30 years before he became financially lucrative. Now, professor, cynical, and you said that you saw this in the archive. What archive are you referring to . Yeah. So mccarthys papers are held at Texas State University in san marcos. And its an incredible collection of papers dedicated to work across his career. All of his manuscripts, much of his correspondence. And its just full of riches about the incredible research, the incredible work that mccarthy did. He was painstaking king craftsmen who worked incredibly hard on all of his books and did you have access to the correspondence that he and his editor, robert erskine, exchanged . Albertus Albert Erskine. Sorry about that. Yeah. Yes. There is correspondence between him and erskine. And then later, once he gets a literary agent, theres some correspondence between him and his agent, as well as correspondence between him and publicists at random house and him and various friends. Now you have a book coming out this fall entitled big fiction how conglomeration changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. Are you saying with regard to Cormac Mccarthy, that it speaks of conglomeration that he is would not survive today . Yes. In no. So the thing that is remarkable about mccarthys career is his transformation. People recognize that the two halves of his career are quite different. The first half of his careers first five novels are very difficult, dense, allusive books. Theyre not market friendly. Theyre not commercial books. The first four appalachian novels and then the fifth is blood meridian, in my opinion. His his masterpiece, his greatest work, which is a sort of sort of western, but not really in the genre. So its a very dark, apocalyptic historical novel and those novels, they they didnt sell at the time. And they wouldnt work well now under the conglomerate era that we currently live in, at least not among commercial publishers. The second half of his career, starting with his 1992 novel, all the pretty horses, is much different. He wrote novels that still have something of that unique Cormac Mccarthy voice, but theyre also more commercial. Theyre more front of the of the market. All the pretty horses. Is it closer to a classic western . Its a Cormac Mccarthys version of a louis lamour novel. It tells a story of a young cowboy who goes down to mexico and falls in love, kills a man, comes home, is got nostalgia for the old west, and its all 100,000 copies. It won the National Book award. It became a blockbuster film with matt damon and the argument that i make in the book is that whats amazing about mccarthy is he adapted to this changing system of publishing across his career. In your guest essay in the New York Times, you compare him somewhat to Colson Whitehead. So, yeah, what i see mccarthy having created with all the pretty horses in 1992, was a Strong Energy for how to navigate as an author. The conglomerate era of publishing. What he figured out was that the techniques that had been developed by genre writers, writers whod been working in mystery or romance or western or Science Fiction since the late 19th century had figured out these forms that were it had a built in audience who were ready to read them. And that could allow a literary writer, someone who had the esthetic ambition of the Colson Whitehead or Cormac Mccarthy, to adapt techniques from genre fiction into a literary work. And that way they could merge some of the demands of the bottom line. The big conglomerate presss need to satisfy with their own innovative literary techniques. And thats what mccarthy did with all the pretty horses in the western in 1892. And Colson Whitehead is the exemplary figure in the 21st century. I mean, many would consider him to be one of the very greatest, one of the most celebrated novelists, american novelist of the 21st century. And across his career, you can chart how book by book he plays with a different genre, elevating it with his literary techniques. So hes really an extension of the work that mccarthy figured out in 1992. And of course, random house today is Penguin Random house with several other imprints embedded there. When did this conglomeration of publishing houses begin . It began in 19. In the 1960s. That was when random house went public and bought tenants and bought pantheon and started collecting these other imprints. And in 1965, rca bought random house. It continued through the late sixties, accelerating in the 70 yrs and and really has gone on and on and on into the present. But what allowed mccarthy to nevertheless write two novels that he did with erskine in the sixties and seventies and early eighties . Was that random house protected itself from some of these pressures by having a president. Robert bernstein, who was there for the first 25 years of the conglomerate era. But buffered the press from rca and its later owner, cy newhouse, and really tried to keep his editors protected, which was not the same at a different houses such as doubleday or simon schuster. Places where those commercial press pressures were more immediately felt. So, prossor cynic, and you note in your guest essay in the New York Times that after bernstein, the new editor of random house, said, hey, each book has to make money. Is that a correct statement . Yeah. So that was reported by albert. By andre schiffrin, who was the editor at pantheon, one of those houses, those imprints. That was within random house. Hed been there since 1962. His father actually had founded pantheon. So hed been there for 28 years. And then the new president , alberto britell, came in and very quickly fired schiffrin and schiffrin reported that bechtels new policy was that every book needs to pay for itself. From now on, they would not be subsidizing some books with other books. So books like mccarthys, like the orchard keeper, like blood meridian, like subtree, which had been subsidized by other books that was no longer going to fly. So in your view, is that the market are the model today . In some of the larger publishing houses, yeah. And theres been increasing ways in which bureaucracy companies these are these are commercial companies theyve got shareholders who they need to satisfy and the way that they try to make this as rational as they can is by using various techniques like profit and loss forms that editors need to fill out when acquiring a new book to determine how much profit theyll make from any given book they want to acquire or they use comparative titles known in the business as cost. Or they say, oh, this new book is similar to these three previous books that all were successful, and because its similar to those, we can bet that this next one is also going to be successful. These these comps whose profit and loss forms have a sort of concern, motive, force, they tend to make acquisitions. Look similar to other acquisitions that have come before. And it teams those commercial addresses makes it a little easier for them to try to figure out how to consistently make a profit on every book that comes through. And so that has that is the general ethos. And it has been institutionally ized in the conglomerate presses as we mentioned. You have a new book coming out in the fall of 2023, big fiction how conglomeration changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. But you also have a previous book, American Literature and the long downturn. Two things. Tell us about your previous book and who is your publisher . Yes, so my previous book is about a pocock liptak writing in contemporary American Literature. It argues that the after the postwar boom of the 1950s and sixties, golden age of capitalism, starting in the 1970s, when we started to see some of the Economic Trends that have continued into the present, where wealth inequality is increased and wages stagnated. One response to this among american writers was to start thinking apocalyptically. So in that book i write about Cormac Mccarthys blood meridian, and i argue that that book is one response to these larger Economic Trends. And that was that was the project. That was the book that got me into his archives and actually started inspiring this next project about the Publishing Industry. That book was published by Oxford University press in my new book, big fiction is published by columbia University Press. Did Penguin Random house have a chance to get your book at all . So as an academic, we tend to we tend to work with University Presses in part because theres a separate a whole separate system of how acquisition and publication works with University Presses versus big trade commercial presses like Penguin Random house, a University Press has a peer review system that means that all of their books go out to specialists in the area in which that book is working. And those specialists have to sign off. And for my boss, the chair of my department, the deans, provost and the president , they like to see that im working with a Peer Reviewed press, the University Press, because that gives the work a little bit more of the academic imprimatur that it needs. For my own career. So i did not let random house have a chance at these books. Well, dan sinykin, i presume you have an agent . What is the process for getting a book to any publisher . And when did Cormac Mccarthy get an agent for the first time . Yeah. So if you want to work with a commercial press, theres you have to have an agent at this point. Most big commercial presses wont even consider a proposal that comes without an agent. Thats not true for every kind of publisher. So weve been discussing these commercial conglomerate presses. But there is a really incredible dynamic, wonderful world, world of Small Independent Presses and nonprofit presses. And many of those presses will take direct submissions from authors. And in the University Press world, where i have been doing my publishing, even though i do have an agent, i dont need an agent to work with the University Presses University Press editors. I regularly meet over zoom or at conferences with academics who they might consider publishing. Its a lot more direct. So. So it kind of depends on who you want to publish with, whether or not you need an agent. And when did mr. Mccarthy get one . Right. So after his editor, Albert Erskine, retired, which was in 1987, and mccarthy realized that hed been protected by erskine for his entire career, and he really wasnt sure what was going to happen after that. One of the wonderful outcomes of publishing my essay with the New York Times was that someone reached out to me over email who had corresponded with mccarthy decades ago in the late eighties, and he shared with me a letter that mccarthy had sent to him a personal letter from Cormac Mccarthy written to him in 1988. And in that letter, mccarthy said that his editor, Albert Erskine, had just retired and and he was not in a good place to offer anybody advice about how to get published at the time, because he said these big publishing companies, theyre not the same as they were when he started. And theyre more like Movie Companies now. And he had no guarantee that they would continue publishing him. So after erskine retired, he was worried. He wasnt sure that he would even be able to continue having a career as a writer. And even as it was, hed never he said in that letter, and he said in letters that i have seen in the archives as well, that at that point in 88, 89, he had not received a single royalty check in his entire career. 28 years, 29 years of writing. He hadnt received a single royalty check. So it was this moment in the late eighties where he thought, if im going to stick around in this business with my editor whos protecting me leaving, im probably going to need a literary agent. So he wrote a letter to probably the most prestigious literary agent, one of the most prestigious theater agents working in america at the time, named lynn nesbit. And she passed that letter down to an ambitious protege of hers named amanda urban, who often goes by the nickname binky. And it just so happened that binky urban had read mccarthys novel tree and thought it was a brilliant, ambitious book itself and decided to take him on as a client. So at what point did random house sell Cormac Mccarthy in a sense, to knopf . And if theyre owned by the same company, whats the whats the purpose of changing imprints . Right. So it was under binky urbans influence that mccarthy went from random house imprint of random house within the larger random House Company to knopf and the two imprints have different reputation. This is not something that your casual reader is going to know much about. But within the industry, theres a little difference between every imprint, every company has a reputation about the kinds of work that they do, how they do it, whos on their list. So first, trust and rose a little different than knopf is a little different than random house or doubleday or simon schuster. They each have the things that they do well. And so random house and knox both exist within the same company because they have slightly different reputations. Canada tends to be a little more literary, a little more prestigious. Random house is a little more mainstream and i think urban decided that it might be worth trying to change things up to try to make all the pretty horses fresh, to give it a fresh start, to try with a new editor, to try with a new imprint. So she went to the new president of notts, who had just come in, a guy named sonny mehta, and asked if he would be interested in trying to take on mccarthy. And sonny made it. Mehta himself. He was following in the footsteps of a giants exnazi robert gottlieb, who recently passed away himself in mehta, was struggling. He was struggling in his first year to not to find his footing, to get support from the employees, to get support from his bosses. And so he was hungry at the time for successes himself, and he thought that he could find in Cormac Mccarthy an opportunity for demons to demonstrate his own abilities as a publisher. So it was a really smart move by the urban to go with sonny mehta, someone who was driven for a big success and could take advantage of this writer had won prestigious awards but had never broken out commercially. The two of those, them together urban and made a started brainstorming yeah all the people they could get involved to try to make all the pretty horses the success it would eventually become. So professor cynic and as Cormac Mccarthy became more successful, the conglomeration model worked for him to his advantage, didnt it . Thats exactly right. And he, you know, i dont know what was in his heart or it isnt in his mind, but the indications from the books themselves suggest that he accommodated the conglomerate era, the books that he wrote, the border trilogy, the two books that came after all the pretty horses form a trilogy of westerns, no country for old men, the road. These are all books that are much more friendly to the market than his first five novels were. Want to ask you, besides the conglomeration and we talk about the big five publishers today, there is another publisher out there, norton. Whats it story . Thats a wonderful question. And theres a whole chapter on in my book, big fiction, just dedicated to w. W. Norton, because it is such an interesting, unique story. W. W. Norton remains independent, and its the largest independent trade publisher in the United States left and the reason its able to succeed where others have not is for two reasons. One is it is employee owned. Its founder, w. W. Norton, was his name. He died young, and his wife decided that she would sell the company to the employees. And it has been an employee uncooperative ever since. The other thing and the employees become very loyal and dedicated. Norton employees tend to stay at the company for a long time in a business where people tend to move around a lot. So its a company that that whose employees have a lot of loyalty to it. The other thing that makes w. W. Norton unique is that its developed a special relationship to Higher Education through its anthologies and critical editions. Anyone whos been an english major been in a literature classroom, theres a good chance theyve been exposed to the Norton Anthology of literature. One of the many variations on it. And that College Division has been financially successful for decades, and that gives the company a bit of a cushion to do some things with poetry and fiction on its trade publishing side that allow it to have a little more experimentalism, to let it play around a little bit, to do things that are maybe a little more interesting or a little less constrained by the bottom line than you see in debate commercial at the big conglomerate publishers. Well, dan sinykin teaches english at Emory University. He has a book coming out in the fall. Big fiction how conglomeration changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. In his guest essay in the New York Times, he writes that Cormac Mccarthys career was an improbable trajectory. Writer toils for decades in obscurity before finding international renown. Its the stuff of legend. The guest essay is entitled Cormac Mccarthy had a remarkable literary career. It could never happen now. Professor cynic and thank you for joining us on book tv. Pleasure. And this is about books, the program and podcast produced by cspan booktv. Well, every tuesday, dozens of new books are published and receive reviews. Heres two in waiting to be arrested at night a week. Poets memoir on chinas genocide. To hear hamid is gil recounts his familys decision to leave china and seek asylum in the United States. Mr. Is gil, who will appear at this years National Book festival, received a Kirkus Review on the book. It noted the book, quote, shines a much needed light on the complex, contradictory emotions of trading a homeland for a lifetime of both safety and survivors guilt. Another new book out is the rubel a political history by ekaterina pravilova. According to a review in the wall street journal, theook is, quote, original, meticulously researched and goes beyond the mere monetary. It, of course, traces the russian monetary unit from catherine the great to modern times. Well, coming up on booktv, its our weekly afterwords program. This week, the daily beasts matt lewis takes a look at how american politics is fueled by wealth. In his book, filthy rich politicians. Heres some of mr. Lewiss comments to booktv. As you know, as a christian conservative, ive a certain worldview, right . So i dont believe in the perfectibility of man. I believe that we are we live in a fallen world and were not going to be perfect and were not going to have perfect politicians. And so just like adam smith believed with economics, that, you know, he didnt think he wasnt gordon gekko. He didnt think greed is good. He thought greed exists. We cant get rid of it. Its human nature. Therefore, lets channel that into people being greedy. So that they will invent a cure for cancer or something. Right. Lets tap into human nature as best we can. So thats the approach that i take with the reforms that i am calling for. I do not think that we can fix the problem of filthy rich politics and or that we can end the corruption, right . I mean, like murder is illegal, but murder, sadly still happen. But policies could affect the number of murders in terms of criminal justice reform. Similarly, when it comes to police in congress, were not going to fix corruption forever. But i do believe that reforms can help. A reminder that afterwards airs every sunday at 10 p. M. On booktv. Well, thanks for joining us on about books. The program and podcast produced by cspan booktv. Well continue to bring you publishing news and author programs and a reminder that you can get this podcast at the cspan now app. You can also watch online any time at booktv dot org