In “Big Fiction,” Dan Sinykin writes with narrative flair about the age of consolidation in the books business.
Literature is, variously: a refuge from reality, an encounter with an era, an expression of a singular sensibility and a sheer delight.
Still, sentimental and naive as I am, I cannot quite shake the conviction that literature is more than an emanation of economic circumstance. For all its fragility and susceptibility to material degradation, it continues to strike me as a member of that endangered and embattled species: art. Under the notoriously laissez-faire Reagan administration, corporate bloodthirst accelerated. As “barriers to consolidation and vertical integration” collapsed, the contemporary literary ecosystem solidified. Random House, already an empire of imprints, was swallowed up by German conglomerate Bertelsmann in 1998; Rupert Murdoch had become owner of Harper & Row in 1987 .
So was publishing — and the fiction it produced — better before the onset of the conglomerate era? Yes and no, is Sinykin’s sensible answer. Mass-market paperbacks were a democratic innovation that rendered high literature accessible to everyone, and publishing operated at a more human scale before corporate leviathans took charge.
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