Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature

In the post-1945 Americanist subfield of sociological literary studies, Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature is arguably the most significant book to appear since Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009). Both books reframe the story of postwar US literary history by focusing on key institutions—the conglomerated publishing industry (Sinykin) and the university-based creative writing program (McGurl)—to demystify how fiction was produced, why it changed, and why it matters for professional literary criticism. Acutely aware of his debt to McGurl, Sinykin even admits that his term “the conglomerate era” is an homage to McGurl’s titular term (19). However, Sinykin’s homage should not be mistaken for uncritical reverence, as he clearly aims to tell an ambitious story that has more explanatory power than McGurl’s earlier institutional remapping of the postwar literary terrain. Sinykin’s ambition is on full...