Transcripts For CSPAN2 Dan 20240705

We were thrilled to have dan sinykin with us for a discussion of big fiction how changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature dan santat is an assistant professor of english at Emory University with a courtesy appointment in, quantitative theory and methods. Hes the author of American Literature and the long downturn neoliberal apocalypse and his writing has appeared in the new york times. The washington, the los angeles review of books, the rumpus and other publications joining dan in conversation is coeditor and publisher of nw plus mark krotov. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming dan and mark to the stage. Hello. Thanks so much for being here. Theres so many places to start. Ill start with myself. How about that . I one of the things that is very exciting to me about talking to you about this book is that i, in some have lived it or have lived a little piece of it working at end. Plus one obviously weve written about about pop, ive written about publishing weve written about publishing. So all this is very familiar, exciting. But then also i came into publishing myself in 2008, which you rightly cite as the sort of year of major transition that happens toward the end of your book. And one of the things that strikes me about people in publishing is that they are almost temperamentally resist tend to self analysis to a certain extent. Theres maybe not like not enough hours in the day for it or something. But they, you know, i think i think i think this has changed with a lot of like growth in sort of labor militancy in publishing. But in general, i think people have a sense of themselves either as like keeping their head down for artistically inclined reasons or keeping their head down for just put upon underpaid reasons or both. And so im very grateful to you for actually, you know, for sort of going to all these people who cannot see themselves as agents of history and and and actually asking them to explain themselves and account for themselves and and really and in this book, revealing so much, so much history that does not make it into, you know, the internal publishing canon also into, i think really most of of of the tradition. And theres a lot in this book that is worth but just the the of the byways and the detours alone are really commendable. And exciting. And so, you know, so this is like this is a source of excitement for me as a as somebody somewhat internal to it, though no longer as internal happily. But i wonder what brought you, you know, a sort of true outsider into this story initially. Yeah. Thanks, mark. So one of the things i learned in the writing of this book in talking a lot of folks and reading a lot of accounts from, people in the business is to be skeptical of the narratives people tell about why do things. So ive also become skeptical of my own accounts of why i do things ive realized ive done a number of interviews for the book and realized that when you start getting asked questions like these you have to invent a sort of story. And so i have invented a story i like to tell a long time now, since since i started, i think the first hints in head of writing a book like this happened almost a decade ago when i was still in graduate School Working on my dissertation and i was at that point thinking about subfield of economics, literature, and i was writing dissertation that was about big changes, the Global Economy and how that changed way that writers were writing. And i was thinking about it somewhat abstractly, but i was getting into writers archives. I was getting into the archives of David Foster Wallace and Leslie Marmon soko and Cormac Mccarthy. And when i was there, i started to realize that there was a very immediate local relationship between economics and literature that was happening, that i wasnt accounting for in the dissertation that was happening in their relationships with their agents and with their editors. And i was starting to see that there was big changes that were happening during their careers in publishing that were affecting providing constraints about the things they maybe could or couldnt do. And thats when i started looking around to see if i could learn more about that history or how that affected writers and i wasnt finding what i wanted find. So that was one source and another source for this book was in my own curiosity as someone who has been shaped very deeply by my experiences as a reader across my life of wondering why im the person i am, why the books that came into my life came into life. There became this kind of big question of why did we have this world of books rather than any other world of books . And the the part of me then that was thinking of economics and literature was like, if i follow the money and kind of get into the labyrinth and try to find answers to the question of why. I was reading Gravitys Rainbow when i was 17 or pierce anthony when i was 13 through looking at the Publishing Industry. The yeah, the why world of books question really resonates a lot because i think it also know it takes us into i mean it takes us obviously into sort of interesting questions about sort of can information that i that i think working editors actually maybe maybe one of the reasons im not a book editor anymore primarily is because i ask myself this question too much but you know every time that you publish a book and it fails, which happens all the time, statistically its much more probable that way. Youre like, oh, but if things had been different, know maybe this would have been a part of Literary History that its just forgotten, right . And similarly, when the success is sort of arbitrary and that sense of, i want to come back to that sort of. But you address arbitrariness in a way that i think is very interesting toward the end of the book. And i want to come back to but i want to but but sort of, you know, the book in a sense, kind of, you know, to be it does many things, but it does it. Two big things. It sort of tells story of conglomeration and its and its sort of tentacles and its oppositions and counternarratives and it also reads you know, it reads a number of works of fiction in analytically to sort of end to try to it reads conglomeration into it or draws conglomeration out of it. I want to im curious very curious about the second part, but for the first part, as a sort of you, as a sort of Research Like corpus how did you. Yeah, how did you sort of make a plan for yourself about which, you know, which draws look into in which corners you would kind of look around and so on. So when started it was a big mess to me and i didnt know where to go or how to organize it and that was really one of the first things i had to figure out. And as i started to to, to explore what was out there, it became clear to me that i needed to divide it up into different sectors that themselves organized publishing kind of imminently within its own logics. So that meant trade publishing, within trade publishing, theres the mass market. So i started out with the mass market which emerged in the United States in its modern form in the end of the 1930s, largely the 1940s. And then there is mainstream commercial trade publishing for, which random house is kind of the key player in the book. And then theres nonprofit publishing which didnt exist in the United States prior to the 1980s and emerged in resistance to conglomeration. And then theres those who remain independent and not yet within conglomerates, but are neither are they nonprofits. And so those seem to me to be four different areas that were each operating in pretty different ways from each other. And it would be interesting to explore how the logic of how each of those worked provided different for all of the people, including the authors and everyone else working those publishers in terms of the kinds of books that they could do, how how so . Yeah, im here. Okay. You keep jumping back and forth just because its its too fun. But so so those are the four, you know, those are the four sort of typologies. And then at what point did you decide that part of this actually had to be or . Was it always the case that part of the project going to be literary, critical in this way . You know, theres a number examples in the book. Theres Tony Morrisons beloved, theres foster wallace, infinite jest, yield, doctorow, and then sort of like really, you know, very the of like some entertaining theres stephen king a lot like basically at every point we get theres Percival Everett we get these kind of we get these, you know, these sort of case studies books in which you know, conglomeration might very well be playing out on the level of narrative or theme or something sort of like deeper and more ineffable. Yeah. How did that part of the project sort of make its way in . In a way, thats what matters most to me and what always mattered most to me. I think of myself as a literary critic, first and foremost. And so thinking how books like infinite jest or all the pretty horses or beloved or ragtime or fight club, how they themselves are. These expressions of what was of of the industrial context in they emerge out of was to me sort of the key to the whole thing. And the most exciting. And its times surprising part of the whole project. And so that was it was probably reading of infinite jest thats in the introduction where im thinking about how book was published by little brown and little brown at the time was in imprint owned ultimately by the Parent Company of time warner, which it was at that time. The largest entertainment in a just being a novel thats entirely dedicated to David Wallaces desire to warn everyone that he thought that entertainment in the United States was going to kill us all. So hes theres this interesting tension that he was deeply aware of in the writing of the book that hes writing a commodity that has to be entertaining enough that people are going to want to read it so that they can get warning that they shouldnt be entertained by time warner, that it kills them and. So theres really interesting and complicated ways in which he was struggling against his editor, pietsch, who would go on to become the ceo of hachette book group. And they had two different objectives and how that between the two of them ended up shaping the book in ways that that again thats that of struggle that you can then read in the book that emerges of this much larger story has to do with how massive are shaping culture is actually more interesting to me than just to think that book in David Foster Wallace his terms has this work thats going to save us all which it clearly hasnt not yet. You know, and so im curious. So we we. How do you do you think that there are sort of big claims to be made about, sort of the literature of conglomeration and more broadly or you think that these are that ultimately what we get are really sort of often revelatory, you know examples of of exemplary works, of exemplary works that show this process be unfolding like is there is there theres, you know, so many ways that theres so many different kinds of things that are that are true about the kinds of books that have been possible because of specific things that have happened. And ill give just one story out of the mass the mass market side of this. So mass market books came a big deal in the 1940s after world war two. Prior to that could be it was it was mass culture for reading was pulp magazines and bookstores were actually relatively few and far between and in the 1940s, those cheap little mass market paperbacks, new companies came out to, Start Publishing those and piggyback on the Distribution Networks that the pulps had to make books, mass cultural items and in the forties and fifties they could publish. This was the University System was expanding with all the soldiers come from the war and it was bringing in women and people of color that it was previously less inclusive of. And so there was all these new readers. The economy was booming and these mass market books, but Companies Thriving and they were publishing faulkner and roth alongside Mickey Spillane and, you know, valley of the dolls. And they were all getting know smutty covers. There was there wasnt there was this this moment in those years where there wasnt quite the divide that were used to now between a sort of Danielle Steel and, you know, jesmyn ward or something. You know, theres a clear, clear divide. It was a little blurrier than. And then in the 70, as you have the these conglomerates buying up these previously independent companies and value suddenly becomes this new hegemonic way for corporations to understand they need to be doing so. You start getting these demands for quarterly growth coming down from on high and at the same time the economy is slowing down. Theres wage stagnation is starting. You got inflation so people have less money to buy books, but theyre getting demands to sell more of them. So what do you do if youre a mass market publisher . Well, you got to figure out how to rationalize the business somehow. You got to figure how to make more money. And they do two things. One is they realize that they can throw these theyve expanded their marketing departments in the seventies, and they realize that they can throw all this marketing weight before behind a few names, make them so wellknown that they become reliable every time they publish a book now become, your stephen king and youre Danielle Steel and your dean koontz and your tom clancy. And the other thing they do is they pick up the model that harlequin. Harlequin is canadian publisher. We all know now is a romance publisher, but necessarily start that way, figure it out in the seventies where you get a paycheck. Writers, not a lot of money. You make these really recognizable series so that people know what theyre going to get. Its a reliable commodity. They buy them and then they keep buying them. And so the two genres that mass market publishers really threw their weight behind this point was romance and fantasy. Fantasy didnt really even exist as a mass genre until 1977, and it was perfect for the new shopping bookstores that were coming up in the shopping malls your waldenbooks and your be dalton, where you had moms and their kids out shopping some moms with the romance books kids would get the fantasy books and we still see that in 2023. If you look at the two genres that are dominating the market, its fantasy and romance that is a that phenomenon in 2023 is the result of what was happening with all of the conglomeration changes in bookselling that was happening in the late seventies. Can you are there sort of can you make a sort of similar case for or you know and i you know just cause i think its fun is there is there a sort of similarly broad or kind of large scale case to be made for a strand of literary as well . You know, and i guess im sort of answering the question. But, but mostly because i its its a its a wonderful my favorite chapter in the book is about nonprofit publishing. And your the sort of your account of of, of the rise of socalled sort of multicultural on the on the sort nonprofit side. I wonder if you could. Yeah if you could talk about that. Is there a tremendous if youre a nonwhite at times in american publishing, there is a friend of mine, richard. So we looked into got all this data on conglomerate publishers lists and looked at the demographics of everyone on those lists and the story weve been telling in American Literature in the universities for a while is that the 1980s and 1990s were these years of the rise of multicultural ism, where our literature got more diverse and it turned out that he found if you look at the list of conglomerate publishers wasnt true. The lists remained more than 90, 90 to 95 white. Well the end of the 20th century in deep into the 21st. So far, so its and then if you are a nonwhite writer, the kinds of stories that people want to publish from you are deeply constrained and way that theyre constrained is very different. Youre writing for a commercial conglomerate press, or if youre writing for a nonprofit, so and the nonprofit places like gray wolf or coffeehouse, we which are the two examples i go into with in the book, if youre a Nonprofit Press in in the 1980s and 1990s, you are defining yourself the conglomerates. This is part of the narrative youre giving to all the people who youre applying to get grants from. And one of the ways youre talking about yourself is saying were going to do something that is literary. When the presses are in the narrative the nonprofits are putting forward, abandoning that work and were going to do were to publish multicultural literature and. If you make your if you say thats your mission that youre going to do multicultural literature that just structurally and inevitably is going to put nonwhite writers in a curious position where even as theyre being, you know, brought in to write for these presses, theyre also inevitably tokenized as nonwhite. So how do writers then respond to that situation . The case studies i look at in a chapter, first of all, ive written Karen Yamashita and what they both do and what many other writers have. I looked at many different writers who were publishing for these presses and others is they they critique kind of multicultural liberal cultural ism from two different directions. One way that they do it often to ionize or be cynical liberal multiculturalism. So this is what we see in Something Like Percival Everetts erasure or karen team. It is tropic of orange where within the books, theyre kind of mocking idea of of a certain kind of identity politics that is going to be satisfying to a liberal white readership which allows them this position of sort of like hedging their relationship. Their relationship is playing certain role as a tokenized nonwhite writer for the nonprofit. And the other thing that happens is doing critique in the sense of looking for very looking at the very conditions that, make them legible in the first place as as writers of a certain identity. So you imagine it as this in i hotel this tremendous novel where shes looking at kind of exploring the foundations of asianamerican identity in the United States and really trying to think it through and also reconcile different literary camps and how they perform those identities by kind of working through. Frank chin, who was a nonprofit writer, and maxine hong kingston, who was a commercial who were very much at odds with each other across their careers. And shes trying to do this work, reconciling those two traditions within asianAmerican Literature, all, as i understand it, has part of the reason that that project is happening and working is because its coming of a nonprofit business right . What what were sort of the most, again, i sort of i really found delightful in in the of in the trade chapters. Theres a lot of really marvel lists and horrific course correspondence that really makes like whatever it makes mad men seem theres theres one letter in there that that just so that everybody has to buy the book just to see this like a completely horrific letter that just goes way beyond what one might expect. But but i but you know but but even looking at this like document of total atrocity, these gender politics did make me sort of suspect that you had a lot of fun in the archives and i was curious about what yeah what what what part this did you just enjoy researching the most. Yes. Is this this is a really mixed methods, i guess you would say an academic book. I did lot of Different Things that i wasnt necessarily planning on doing in the first place. I did a lot of archival work and the day when i ended up going through all of bennetts staff. One of the cofounders of random house, his papers a little bit later on in his life and just finding insanely sexist letters after one after another. I mean, was a few where i like had to like kind of lean over, scrape my jaw, the floor of the reading room in columbia, columbias rare books library, because they were so astonishing and strange and so. I mean, i loved the time in the archives i spent time at university of minnesota, which has milkweed editions and gray wolf presses archives. I spent time in the university of iowa, which has coffeehouse presses archives. And i dont know this is is nerdy, academic part of me just loves sitting through all this stuff and finding things that i havent anywhere. And i dont know if theyve been published before. Just kind of like, wow, this is an astonishing piece of the story of publishing history. Thats sitting here in front of me on this table, i also started interviewing people, which i didnt. It wasnt part of my plan. I did it first because i was going to look at the novelist alison lowrys papers up in ithaca at cornell, i did my ph. D. And i wanted to i was writing about one of her novels from the sixties, and i was interested in or correspond ins with philip roth. And look at that correspondence to philip roth. You actually, i needed philip roths permission. And i managed to acquire philip roths permission formally in an email the next day he died, which actually muted the point because it said once he was dead could look at it. But it was so that was i killed. Philip roth. And i thought, you know, alison lurie lives in ithaca. I wonder what would happen if i just got in touch. And, you know, she was, i think, in her early nineties at that point. And she incredibly gracious and invited me into her home and served tea and we had like she you know some of the stuff ends up in the book she told me something she had just she was really Close Friends with roth. So when i talked to her, she had just back from the funeral and she talked about how she was in roths apartment and there was this plant stand that had a hat on it. And that had it been there for a long time, ever since saul bellow got back from his nobel ceremony and gave philip roth the hats that he could wear to his nobel some day and so i had this is this incredible conversation with with with larry, who for years had kind of a column on the semiotics of fashion in nairobi. And as my partner and i were there together and we were kind of leaving heading out the door, shannon stopped us, did a quick reading of our outfits she i was wearing these pants that id gotten like a deep discount from macys but she like look at my pants shes like those are the pants of an ambitious man. So you and then the pandemic hit and i was i was at that point getting into the w. W. Norton section of the book and i was going to maybe see if i could get into our archives which is it turned out were kind of unorganized in a warehouse somewhere in pennsylvania, which also sounded horrific to try to sort through. And the incredible administrator at w. W. Norton, louise brockett, i got in touch with her and she very generously just started putting me in touch with people for interviews at norton. And i also went to the doubleday page and i went to the bottom of the page where their emails were. And i never in a million years going to work, but i just clicked the general email address and i was like, hey id love to talk to jerry howard. I see jerry out there, jerry as i dont think in a million years this is going to work. And a couple of days later i got an email, someone at doubleday and said jerry would love to talk with you. Heres his contact information. So jerry gave me an interview so that without, you know, i the archives and the interviews ended up being just tremendously satisfying. You on in the book. You sort of you you make clear that you not going to make an evaluative case about the the sort of the trajectory literature in the conglomerate era youre not going to say that it got better or worse and you offer you know very sort of compelling argument for why you wont do that and still why wont do that . So when i was at the beginning of this project looking out at the train to figure out how this whole thing, you know, this this terribly opaque publishing world, that even people are closer to it, have a hard time seeing what i was seeing. And basically all i was seeing was people telling the same narrative over and over again, which is that conglomeration was ruining books. Then youd have the people who were saying, oh, no, no. Usually like the bosses, you know, the people are running places like, no, no, no, thats actually made books much better. And that was like what i was finding when i was starting this project over and over again. And it got pretty, pretty fast. And, you know, the story, i guess, traces back to the late seventies and saw that same kind of story about, oh, ruined books. Oh, no, its actually way better than it used to be kind of happening 45 years in kind of the same way. And if i go off, im going to tell this story of having to intervene in. This conversation like. Im already bored of that story. And it seemed to me that there were way more interesting stories to tell. I mean, the publishing world we have in the United States is very large and very capacious and when i look at conglomerates now what, you have like at random house, you everything from crown the commercial end, you know pantheon at the literary end up closer to pantheon random house, closer to crown you know Simon Schuster got scribner and harpercollins has echo like so and scribner jesmyn ward and riverhead at random house publishes lauren groff. I mean, i think these people are great novelists. Its just its it seems a lot more interesting to me to slow down a second to bracket that question. Oh, did make it better or worse and try to actually dig into of the mechanics of what happened to look at some of the complexity and to see that theres some good things that happened a lot of bad things that happen. I think were living in a moment like wonderful Small Presses. And i think a lot of those Small Presses that i mean, there were no nonprofits until they were emerged out of rejecting conglomeration. So thats one way of thinking dialectically about, you know, we have all these we Development Hub city and of course great wall which is now massive and coffeehouse is very large. But all these smaller nonprofits too, who are doing some of the incredible work small independent presses. Its all part of this larger that i think we have a Pretty Healthy i actually think we have a Pretty Healthy book culture at moment so im going to stay on this for a while. I know you dont necessarily know. Its no its, its very compelling. And in fact, you know, obviously when i tried to sort of make some sense of this in im plus one a few years ago you directed me to to doctorows wonderful senate testimony. When was that . That was in 1988. Right. Right so in 1980 and. Yes, and i suppose youre right that i have the experience of reading doctorow in 1980, and i was like, wow, hes really its 1980. And then i had the experience of reading jerry howard in the late eighties, i think in the american scholar. And, and i was like this, wow, jerry howard is really right. Then i had the experience reading jerry howard to get an m plus one. Its like hes still right and and and i yeah youre always right thats consistent and i yeah, i mean, you know, theres a sort of perverse i mean so just to lay my cards the table, you know, i think that one one thing that does this seems to be happening. I think this is obviously anecdotal until one of your students decides to write about this in, their book, their future book is we are seeing a and this is we this story play out in your book. But but i think with some interesting kind of variation and youre right that the that the the Small Presses kind of up the pick up the slack to some extent. But we are see we are clearly in an era of declining editorial autonomy especially on the conglomerate side. But i think know as an editor who spent some time working at Small Presses as well, i can say it wasnt as if my work as an editor, which took quite seriously, was under appreciated. It was just that there was no and time to do it because of the financial to publish, publish, publish, write. So that that to me the part of the story that feels feels a little precarious now, you know, one might say, okay, well at least on the conglomerate level, we now a case where a lot of authors and sometimes publishers hire freelance editors or sometimes former employees of the publisher who i guess they dont all are going have to pay Health Benefits to to to do this work for them and still you know, im not persuaded that with the departure every jerry howard that there is future sort of that there are future jerry howards in waiting not out of a lack of talent or or curiosity or intellectual ambition on the part of the youth. Its actually just that there is such a thing as institutional memory and as as a kind of house intellect, as it were and that feels quite precarious to me now having said all that is the case that could read your book as saying that to some extent editors are maybe not the driving horse force of Literary History as we editors like to think, because, you know, to take your case for sort the resilience of American Literature really seriously, it is the case that contemporary novelists are probably less than they than of them used to be. Right. So so heres my thought about this. And i really learned from the recently deceased american sociologist howard becker, who is one of the great sociologists of art. But didnt do a whole lot on the sociology of literature. His his idea about sociology, of art, like any art piece, is actually built from a very large collectivity of many different people. And are wrong when we focus on a single figure and try to understand that work of art through that singular author figure. And i think in the case of literature, one of the things im really trying to do in this book is get us to think much harder about the figure of the author in the milieu of all the other people that helped the book and also the figure of the editor. In the middle, you have all the other people that build a book. So it is early in the introduction i talk about exactly what you described about the editor that has three different rules there. There they acquire books, they edit books and theyre the manager in house. Thats sure that the book is going through and getting published well and that their job is to become increase either as the acquirer and the manager. And the work of editing has just kind of got out until it almost has to happen, on your own personal time. But in but theres these other things. If you look if you step back and look at the full ecosystem of how books are, one thing that has happened is the literary agent come in and is doing more of work in a lot of occasions. There are the agent and the editor have different structural incentives. The agent makes a commission of the amount of money the book makes so even the agent disavows it. The agent has sort of interest in seeing a Financial Success of a book and is going to direct an author in certain directions because of that. You also have the in the same years that the editors job became less and less about editing, you had the vast expansion of mfa programs, which is a form of editing and a form of shaping and getting lots of peoples eyes, developing, you know, informal writers groups, the people you trust. If you look at the acknowledgments pages, youll often find people thinking people from mfa program, people they were friends with at state, have stayed friends with who read their drafts. So people in that didnt i mean, those existed in the 40 to 56 years but didnt expand to become a real professional path until the nineties. And so thats a relatively recent phenomenon. And so theres all these other ways that people are edited, even if its not by the editor editor. I see. I buy this even if it even if it, you know instantiate some kind of superfluous. I but but but but actually sort of staying on on this roughly this this is a question that i thought about a lot as as i was reading the book on the sort of influence on the author. You know, you invoke a girl, right, periodically as an important, you know, and a sort of important influence and in a very compelling writer on on the sort of on other things. Right. The transformation of, the role, the sort of the relationship between the mfa, the transformation of American Fiction in the 20th century. There. It seems to me that that its actually like the process of of influence is in some sense quite clear cut. You know, these people are in a room together years at a time. They are really like learning. Theyre learning how to write. They are learning values. They are sort of sleeping with their peers. And all of this is having, you know, a sort of an impact on on on on their creation. The writers under conglomerate, for the most part, to me, like, i mean, all the mfa stuff pertains but they seemed their relationships to the editor agent, the marketer these feel. And here im sort of speaking experience these feel to me like in some sense much relationships right . And so i wonder like and this is something that, you know, i sort of thought about, you know, when i was an Editorial Assistant and sort of like watching manuscripts evolve, take shape and, you know, in some very vulgar trying to sort of decode influence, i, im curious about what you would say is the sort of like on the most granular level, maybe you can take one authors an example or even make kind of general claims like how does the how does the influence influence of conglomeration actually seep in . So in this, if howard helped me with one part of the project, the french sociologist Pierre Bourdieu helped me with this part of it, this part of the project, understanding that every writer is internalizing that theres a process of anticipatory social socialization that sociologists will say, where unconsciously, usually not always. Someone like philip roth, he was very conscious. I think, first of all, ive heard its often quite conscious too, but usually a writer is learning the game that theyre supposed to be playing by reading the people who are succeeding in that game and the game is different if youre trying to, you know, a commercial mass writer, if youre trying to be a certain of literary writer, if youre writing for a press, theres Different Things that are going to allow you to succeed. And by looking out and reading the books that helping you succeed, whether you know it or not, youre learning the rules of that particular game. And so no one is ever like no editor or literary agent is that are ever going to sit you down. Well, this is not actually exactly true. It also like when lester del rey created contemporary version of the fantasy genre, he sat Piers Anthony down essentially, and look, you need this, this, this, this, this, write a book, you know, and then he wrote the present novel. So in that you actually have a very clear cut sense of like were trying to do derivative lord of the rings and its going to sell bunch, so were going to do that, right . So a case where you do very clearly, but you have someone like, you know, probably the, the like cleanest store version of this story. I have in the book is Cormac Mccarthy and how, you know, for first half of his career he writing really weird that i loved his like first three appalachian novels and the big long such tree in the blood meridian all very strange books that didnt sell went out of print and then albert erskine, editor of his whole career retired and in the eighties and he would he was writing letters to people in the middle eighties being like, i dont know how much longer im going to be able to do this. The book industry is like, oh, its like i cant i dont know, i can do the thing im going to do. I dont have a smoking gun. I was like, oh, im going to become a commercial writer now. But he starts working with binky urban is incredible, like super famous agent. He starts working with a gary fisk at john sonny maida and chip kidd does his book design all the kind of all these top talent come around and start working with him in the late eighties and in hes never got a single royalty check by 1989 and then he writes this really vastly book stylistically all the pretty horses which is like like like does louis lamour and you know its a great book. Its still its still mccarthy but its completely than his earlier stuff and it sells you. 100,000 copies quickly becomes a movie with matt damon, a National Book award and and this idea of doing a literary novel becomes commonplace after. That and why does that happen . The the argument in the book is that theres this this becomes the new rules of the game. The new consensus authors start to recognize consciously or not that this is a way to be success for as a literary writer at, a conglomerate press. So thats thats where i think ill take it all, right . Lets, lets have some questions. Theres some microphones thatll be handed out, so dont be shy. Were ill start calling on you if have a question, just raise your hand. Well come to you. All at once. Hi. This is a really fascinating conversation. I havent read the book yet. Im really excited to. I work in publishing and have for. 25 years. It sounds. Im interested that the thesis i understand what youre saying is that conglomerates actually change the kinds of books that these writers wrote. I think thats fascinating because i with so id love to bring up his name but hes hes been around a lot lately andrew wiley is another one of these writers that. I mean, agents that like, you know, he famous said to martin amis, i will make you a half million on this next book. Its not cleared. I dont remember what book that was for. Its not cleared. Sorry for the information. Okay, whats the information . Vastly different than money from. Seven years previous. I mean, it doesnt necessarily work that fast or that immediately. And wylies coming in at a moment when probably the information already been on its way. And so as i was just kind of talking through with mark, theres rarely a smoking or a sort of direct causality happens. What youre looking at is something thats happening more dispersed in the kind of rules, the game, the kind of things that are working, succeeding. And then its theres feedback loops by which authors themselves change or the books that become successful are the ones that are working because conditions of the industry have changed. Well, i mean it seems like these agents have actually they have access to so much more with the conglomerations of these publishers. I mean, you can only ask for a half million dollars. So like wylie and roth is is an interesting case. So roth was at fsg, you know, the zuckerman for much of the zuckerman years. And it culminates in kind of life, which which i think is, you know, maybe his greatest novel. And its also his most fsg novel. Its the one that brings him closest to Something Like grace paley or donald bartolome or to a kind of, you know, shylock, maybe to. And then y wylies like, you know. Roger strauss is never going to be able to pay you as much as your worth. So he takes him away and brings me to two more commercial press. He like has his great of novels in the nineties, but theyre not the counter life. Theyre not these kind of postmodern. Kind of fascinating toy of a novel that counter life is. And they do have the commercial success that that he in in the nineties but i think american pastoral is a very different novel and a more commercially designed novel than the counter life is. Okay. Okay. So its interesting. I cant wait to read the book. Oh, hi, dan. I first of thought, well, this is my life. I mean, i spent 42 years in the system that you and the first thing i want to do is congratulate you for getting it right, which is you you talk about it being opaque from the outside, everything. I guess it is from the inside. Its like being its like your life is like reading Edgar Allan Poes into the maelstrom. You what i mean you have to you to master the chaos youre within to stay alive. I and its very well too its a pleasure to read and thats thing i want to say to all your book buyers out there the only place where i felt i wanted to push on you on was exactly this question of does the system influence the way that the writers and in many and many ways its obvious that they do you talk about industrial writers and we know who they are and god bless because they they keep the lights on and the paychecks not not bouncing, frankly. And so this is not a snobby stephen king. I work for three Publishing Companies and stephen king paid a lot of my salary. Okay, but but believe it or not, after 42 years in the system, im still rather romantic about about the autonomous literary imagination and that i really truly believe whether its true or not, i believe that that novelists are in there as people theyre theyre like you and me as novelists. They are higher forms of life with with with higher perceptions that not that float free of all this we live in. Sorry, cspan and i think. I think youre you you try to read as an allegory of Toni Morrisons remove yourself from random house. I dont buy that. I think youre right on infinite jest being an allegory of of David Foster Wallace his into into the literary or the entertainment Industrial Complex e. L. Doctorow ragtime i dont think so i think theres a doctor over who is a. A great public intellectual a critic of the of the system. And then theres the e. L. Doctorow, the novelist. And he dont i dont quite buy that, but i, i i want to make i want stand up for and and make a statement for. Oh, and don delillo. So don delillo is the single in my or he edited libra just in my mind he is the single most autonomous literary intelligence that america has had for the past 50 years. And when he when he when he writes publishing, he does it in the satirical mode. Libra and now to so defend yourself then. Yeah i so am i. I hope i hold to my position on the the way i think in this country we love the fantasy that you just described about authorship we are deeply attached to a notion of creativity, to a kind of dream that authors bring us something something special. They have access to some kind of powers of imagination, creativity then becomes this cultural gift us all. And my hard sell is that i think thats a fantasy. And i and one of the things i think i didnt do as well as i would have liked, i sometimes im still kind of trying to figure out how to scratch that itch is make that case more than i did in the book. Im completely convinced by my reading of beloved. But clearly not everyone else is. It came up in a review, the new yorker and a few places like do people like to point that one out . But i the evidence is very strong on my side. This instance i feel like when you look at Toni Morrison herself and the words she uses and the way she sets up the parallel in the in the foreword to beloved when shes writing about how this book came to be. I like in a way im, im in the way i try to tell that story rhetorically in the book. I try to say, look, im handing over the interpretation to morrison herself of her own book. Like, this sounds a little crazy, but just watch what shes saying. Shes saying, look, im sitting on the pier after ive quit my job, im looking at the hudson and im trying to figure out like what that what am i feeling like . I feel and i dont know what it is. I feel unsettled. I dont know what it is, she says. I feel free. This is so strange. I feel free. What its incredible. Im happy. Then dont have to go back to the goddam office for the first time in 16 years, so feel free. She uses the word free in Orange County that that freedom is not having to engage with transit. Im sure thats part of it. But so and then she and then the way she writes about it is she this language that is echoes exactly the language she uses in book for the character baby sucks when she makes it north feels her own body. They both about this heartbeat that theyre feeling and as that she feels that what she feels free. She herself says that moment on pier that shes narrating the story. She says enter beloved and the concept of freedom in beloved is is the heart of that. So its crazy to think that the work that beloved is this product of publishing and shes the one whos telling us that it is. So when people when you when you tell me that its not what what im hearing is not that the evidence isnt on my side. What im hearing is that we have such a fast nation and that were so weve got this fantasy of authorship and creativity has such a hold of us and Toni Morrison above all, above any other author. Shes the author feel most need as americans feel delillos right there too as as like these figures who are bringing us something special. And its its not a happy story to try to deflate that balloon. And yet i ultimately think that the story that im telling is is the truer one i have to be, you know, i have to be very diplomatic and a as your interlocutor. But i will just say, you im as marxist as they come. And even i, you know, you i mean, part of why i think you should take what says seriously. Well, two things. One, authors lie in their prefaces all the time its like at the fakest place. If you read any of the prefaces to John Le Carres novels where he talks about his literary. Its like its specious. I mean, amazing. Its great stuff. The first thing i said is not to trust authors. Yeah, right. But, you know, think all i will say is that i think the the tension of of someone who spent his career, you know like not averse to demystification of the industry as a whole and yet working with authors again and again and of persuaded of the fact that the one part of this thats like that that is inchoate is the creation itself. And you know, in my experience is nearly as robust. But i, i feel the same. Yeah. I dont know, would just i would just make a case for, you know, its certainly i dont know. I think that my, my experience of reading the book up quite closely, i think theres some of these instances where the sort of the narrative, a kind of conglomeration is just revelatory. And hillary and and enriches the reading experience so much as infinite jest. And i was quite persuaded of the of the doctorow example also actually. But, but, but dont know. I guess i would do. Do you really think that were so attached to the myth of like individual or genius i feel like if anything were at a moment where we could use a little bit of it. No. Do i absolutely think were constantly, repeatedly centering the author again and, centering the author and erasing everyone else whos contributing to the ideas. So but i also want to Say Something about some of the readings where its not as if every reading of this book is like, oh, look, that book, another allegory of theres theres plenty of readings in the book where what showing rather is that there are that there that that the industrial context that it emerges out of the book is to it or is shaped by it. And one of various ways i think the reading of my reading of Danielle Steel or my reading of Chuck Palahniuk are cases looking at fight club and the curiosities of fight club. One of my favorite stories is how fight club got published. Jerry at norton. Even though the editor chief star lawrence he told me like to burn every single copy of the book that existed if he could and that theres this interesting case where where fight club is this book of class resentment and yet the sort of world that norton represents is kind of exactly the kind of class world at that moment that he was writing against, even at the same time that he, with this book, was trying to join that class. And so theres this kind of complex reading, that reading the book, theres not im not saying oh, fight club. Its another story of conglomerations. Yeah. No to defend myself on that count because sometimes people are like he bases he sees as conglomeration. No definitely. And again really the chapter on nonprofit and and yeah the account Karen Yamashita is really yeah its its really its fantastic and worth it for that alone. One question this evening. Okay so lets say that we agree that the work of art is product of the system publishing. You have any ideas on how to tweak the system, change the incentives so that we get more libras and more blood meridians . So i what weve got right now is a really capacious as i said earlier book world the United States where weve made weve found ways to make space at places like gray wolf or coffee house or deep vellum or hub city or ny or or transit or archipelago. So growth of new directions. I mean, im just so im just naming some of the places that are not conglomerate presses i think the problem often is that the conglomerates have much more money and so much more capital and so many more connections to the world of publicity that. When you see that that they take up a lot of oxygen in the in in in all the kind of what we see they you in all the lists of like the best 20 books of the season or the the a lot of the major prizes youre much more likely to see the books from the big conglomerate houses it can be a little you have to work a little bit harder sometimes to find the places where the next lever or the next blood meridian is going come from. But i actually think that weve got you know, theres been great in the 21st century. Thanks, folks like chad poster open letter in getting a lot more translations in the United States than were 20 years ago. So what i think happened is that within and even within conglomeration, you have room for for like i mentioned, lauren groff and jesmyn, a couple of writers that are able to find space in conglomeration to do work that i think is fantastic. So im actually not so worried that i do think plenty that can be plenty to be tweaked. But i also want to hesitate from a kind of doom prism about the state that were in, because i think theres a lot of Little Pockets and a lot of little places. We start looking around to find, you know, great novels happening all the time. Hey, lets give him a round of applause. Good evening. My name is elliot. And eh