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 LikePercival 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