On Capitalist Fiction

Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction feels like a major contribution: to our understanding of contemporary literature and literary publishing as an industry, definitely; to literary criticism as a whole, probably; and maybe to our conception of how culture, in general, is made. It is a thoroughly researched, engagingly written, and clear-sighted cultural materialist analysis of the sort that feels almost verboten within the formal and professional fields of artistic production.¹ To suggest that something so crass as conglomerate logic—i.e., the whims of twelve perverts in a room looking to round out their defense contracting corporation with synergistic asterisks like Random House²—could predetermine the majority of all literature the reading public receives, feels impolitic; it offends our sensibilities about the indomitability of genius, the unbounded potential of imagination, or your friend whose book just came out. Tricky waters indeed.