‘To stay out late, to remain awake and mobile from dusk till dawn, to walk the streets all night as Charles Dickens did during a bout of insomnia in 1860, is to enter an unfamiliar state of being and seeing,” notes Dan Richards in Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark. An immersive blend of memoir and investigative journalism, the book finds the author unearthing the stories of shift workers and those who do essential labour while the rest of us sleep.

Richards, who reveals he is naturally more owl than lark, meets dock workers in Southampton; outreach workers at St Mungo’s providing support for the homeless; a search and rescue team in Lincolnshire; and night ferry operatives transporting sleeping passengers from Aberdeen to Lerwick in Shetland. In the early hours, he visits The Dusty Knuckle in Dalston, London, a bakery that trains young people with troubled backgrounds in the art of bread making. He also talks to the mothers of newborn babies negotiating night feeds through a fog of hormones and exhaustion.

Richards is our narrator, and his reading, like his book, is atmospheric and illuminating. His voice crackles with emotion as he recounts his behind-the-scenes experience of the nocturnal life of a hospital. In this instance, the author was not a dispassionate observer but a patient, admitted to Edinburgh Royal Infirmary with Covid in the early months of the pandemic. Richards’ eight-day hospitalisation was passed in a “semi-delirious trance”, frightened for himself and his loved ones and concentrating on “my one job: to breathe, to live”.

Available via WF Howes, 9hr 3min

Further listening

Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference
Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury, 5hr 55min
The Dutch historian’s latest is an optimistic call for life’s achievers to put their talents to a higher calling: to make the world a better place, whether tackling the climate crisis or helping to avert the next pandemic. Narrated by Boris Hiestand.

Notes on a Drowning
Anna Sharpe, Orion, 9hr 40min
Hanako Footman reads this tense and fast-moving thriller in which a legal aid lawyer and a Home Office adviser investigate the death of a young women who drowned in the Thames in suspicious circumstances.

Sufferin’ satellites! The quintessential British space hero Dan Dare is back, 76 years after he first appeared in iconic comic magazine the Eagle.

With all eyes on Nasa’s Artemis II moon mission, and with the big-screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s science fiction novel Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, going stratospheric at the box office, our love affair with space has been reignited.

So the return of Colonel Dan Dare, chief pilot of the Interplanet Space Fleet, who debuted in the first issue of the Eagle on 14 April 1950, couldn’t be more timely.

With the blessing of the Dan Dare Corporation, which owns the rights to the comic strip – originally written and drawn by the Manchester-born illustrator Frank Hampson – the comic writer Alex de Campi and artist Marc Laming have reinvented the beloved characters for the 21st century in a graphic novel to be published by B7 Comics.

The impetus came from de Campi, who said: “I moved house a couple of years ago and was unpacking boxes of books when I pulled out some of my old Dan Dare compendia, so I sat down on the floor and re-read old Frank Hampson strips for an entire afternoon.

“Over the following weeks I kind of daydreamed what it would be like to have a modern Dan Dare. That resulted in me emailing the Dan Dare Corporation asking if I could pitch a new Dan Dare graphic novel series. They said yes.”

She brought in Laming, who knew Andrew Mark Sewell of B7 Comics, which has form with British icons – in 2023 the company published a graphic novel biography of the comedian Tony Hancock – and the project had liftoff.

There have been several iterations of Dan Dare since the Eagle ceased publication in 1967, with the character brought back for the launch of the long-running sci-fi weekly 2000AD in 1977, and for the relaunch of the Eagle comic in 1982. The writer Grant Morrison and artist Rian Hughes envisaged an aged, bitter Dare in a bleak revisionist strip in the magazine Revolver in 1990.

But the new graphic novel, Dan Dare: First Contact, goes back to basics. The cast of characters includes the scientist Prof Jocelyn Peabody and Dan’s faithful sidekick Digby, as well as their arch-enemy, the dome-headed, green-skinned Venusian dictator the Mekon.

De Campi and Laming are rebuilding the Dare legend from the ground up, with no prior knowledge required. De Campi said: “Everyone loves space adventure stories, but it feels like all we get these days in the west are the same two legacy IPs – Star Wars and Star Trek – flogged at us over and over. But after a while, those universes become so huge and complicated it becomes an impediment to new audiences.”

There will be some changes for a modern audience in the 100-page graphic novel, which will be released in November after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

In the original comics, Digby was Dare’s middle-aged “batman”, a servant assigned to military officers, and serving as bumbling comic relief. In the new version he is a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants young working-class engineer and inventor – but, fans will be relieved to hear, still from Wigan.

And Prof Peabody is now of Indian descent. De Campi said: “Any space exploration story is by nature a story about colonisation, and it makes it more interesting to have someone who has the experience of being colonised in her cultural heritage.”

Perhaps the biggest change, though, is the future world that Dare and co inhabit. Hampson’s original vision, conceived after the horrors of the second world war, was almost utopian. In Dan Dare: First Contact, climate change has ravaged Earth, but Britain is a progressive vanguard in the world – and the galaxy beyond.

“The USA is now the United Corporations of America, and space flight has been privatised,” said de Campi. “Except in the UK, which, after teetering on the brink of abandoning its public services in the 2020s, pulled back and recommitted to things like universal public health care, education, infrastructure, transportation – and space flight.”

Sewell, of B7 Comics, said: “Alex and Marc’s exciting new take is intended to introduce a new generation of readers to Dan Dare whilst staying true to the characters, world and sense of hope and wonder of the original 1950s strip.

“It’s important to acknowledge the heritage and essential DNA of the original strips, whilst moving the stories and characters forward and making them relevant and relatable to a modern audience. Always remembering never to throw the Mekon out with the bath water!”

Dan Simmons, the author of more than 30 novels and short story collections spanning horror, political thrillers and science fiction such as Hyperion and The Terror, has died at age 77.

Simmons died in Longmont, Colorado on 21 February, with his wife and daughter at his side, his obituary announced.

The author was best known for Hyperion, his 1989 science fiction novel that won the prestigious Hugo award for best novel and a Locus award; Simmons later wrote three sequels.

Over his career he also won two World Fantasy awards, a dozen Locus awards, the Shirley Jackson award, and several Bram Stoker awards, while his 2007 novel The Terror, a fictionalised imagining of what happened on the doomed Franklin expedition, was adapted into an acclaimed television series in 2018.

Born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1948, Simmons grew up in Illinois and Indiana. He worked as an elementary school teacher for 18 years, in Missouri, New York and Colorado, where he was once finalist for Colorado Teacher of the Year.

“Every day after lunch, Dan told his students a daily installment of an epic tale that started on the first day of school,” his obituary reads. “As they listened, the students would color illustrations that he’d drawn for them. When the story finally came to an end on the last day of school, many recall being reduced to tears. This story would go on to become Dan’s Hyperion Cantos.”

Simmons’s first novel, Song of Kali, was published in 1985. His other books include his 1989 vampire horror Carrion Comfort, 1991’s Summer of Night, the sci-fi epics Ilium and Olympos, and 2009’s Drood, based on the last years of Charles Dickens’s life.

His 2011 political thriller Flashback, however, was widely criticised as an anti-left rant, imagining a dystopian future where mass immigration, the climate change “hoax”, “socialist entitlement programs” and foreign policy failures under Barack Obama have led to the ruin of America, a “Second Holocaust” and the rise of an Islamic “New Global Caliphate”.

In response to the criticism, Simmons pointed out he’d written a short story version in 1991 that imagined a post-Reagan US, telling an interviewer: “I’ve been called a Nazi. I’ve been called a racist. People who have no idea of my life, what I’ve done, how I’ve worked for civil rights throughout my life, or what my politics have been, and what Democratic candidates I’ve written speeches for … They think I was just going after Obama in the book; well, it used to be Reagan, and if I had waited a few years it would be whoever else would be president.”

“Like his early reading pursuits, Dan always wrote about what he loved,” his obituary reads. “He defied literary norms by writing across genres, switching between major publishers, and defying pressure to conform to formulaic novels.

“Dan was a profoundly curious learner who delighted in connecting with other curious minds, and the many stories he dreamed up helped him connect with others throughout his entire life.”

History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it’s more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats. In Cruickshank’s pages, classical influences from Rome and Greece give way to a revival of medieval English gothic and the emergence of modernism.

He is particularly interested in who commissioned and built his chosen dwellings, and how they got the job done. It’s a new spin on the recent fashion for historians to explore the homes of commoners, as opposed to royalty and aristocrats, in order to tell the life stories of their occupants. This probably began with the late Gillian Tindall, who wrote a highly original book about the various tenants of an old house by the Thames next to the rebuilt Globe theatre. That was followed by several series of A House Through Time, fronted by Traitors star David Olosuga.

At first sight, Cruickshank seems to have set himself a thankless task – and dragged the reader into it alongside him. When it comes to establishing how early buildings went up, there isn’t a lot to go on. “Few contemporary or intimate documents – such as letters or diary entries – survive in significant number that chronicle [their] creation,” he says. But all is not lost. “What does survive are building accounts that list names of tradesmen, sums charged and dates on which bills were paid.” He concedes that this throws up “somewhat arid evidence”, and he isn’t kidding: for lengthy stretches, “The English House” is constructed out of yellowed builder’s dockets mashed up with dense architectural jargon (“… a semi-elliptical colonnade formed by four free-standing Ionic columns supporting a full entablature and flanked by pedimented door surrounds”). Cruickshank could be forgiven for wishing that his book was accompanied by a TV series – with graphics to explain various construction techniques – and if so, he wouldn’t be the only one.

A house is not a home, as Bacharach and David rightly told us, and fortunately Cruickshank’s research ends up revealing a surprising amount about the inhabitants of his eight properties. Pallant House in Chichester, now an art gallery, was the scene of lively arguments between the young swell who commissioned it and his older wife who paid for it all. This didn’t go unnoticed by their tradesmen, whose records of work on the house expose the couple’s frequent disagreements about what should go where and how much they should fork out for it. In Hull, a man called Henry Maisen built a fine house for himself in the mid-18th century but left most of the work to his brother, Nathaniel, while he enjoyed himself in London. In 1744, Nathaniel wrote him an exasperated letter care of “Mrs Rawlinson’s, A Toy Shop, Bedford Street, Covent Garden”. This was a red-light district, and as Cruickshank notes, the first children’s toy shop in the capital wouldn’t be open for another 16 years – so “it seems not unlikely that the toys available at Mrs Rawlinson’s were of a distinctly adult nature”.

If the author is a little uncomfortable with this evidence of the ageless human comedy, he’s more receptive to the darker stories he uncovers. The Boundary Street estate in London’s Shoreditch, begun in the 1890s, was home to the first council flat “as we know it”, says Cruickshank. Though it replaced a notorious and fetid slum, most of the luckless inhabitants of the rookery were moved on rather than rehoused. A banker’s residence in Liverpool prompts an exploration of the port’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. A house built by Huguenots in Spitalfields, east London, might nowadays be close to the homes of millionaire artists including Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George (and of Cruickshank himself, though he doesn’t say so) but these French Protestants, fleeing Louis XIV, were only the first wave of embattled immigrants on the premises. It was later a synagogue, now abandoned. “It takes only a little imagination to fill its shadowy corners with spectres, and it’s hard not to strain to hear the voices of the long dead.”

At about 4pm, the riot police closed in, blocking exits from Parliament Square. After a heart-catching winter sunset, temperatures plummeted towards freezing and Dan Hancox was not alone in wanting to go home. The police had other ideas. “With their black snoods up and their thick plastic visors down,” he recalls, “the postmodern storm troopers of the Metropolitan police’s Territorial Support Group were unrelenting and unmoved.”

Hancox, a white middle-class thirtysomething journalist, was about to be taught a life lesson. It’s one the less privileged people learn earlier. When the police come, they’re not necessarily there to help – at least not to help you.

If you’re in a crowd that Hancox spends much of this book eulogising – be they football fans, ravers, student protesters, Notting Hill carnival-goers, or women roughed up by police while peacefully protesting against another officer who had raped and murdered Sarah Everard – state violence is liable to come into focus as fast and real as a heart attack.

And so it was for Hancox on 9 December 2010 in London, where he had been demonstrating against the new coalition government’s tripling of university tuition fees and swingeing public services cuts. He was surprised to find he and fellow protesters later described by the prime minister, David Cameron, as “feral thugs… hell bent on violence”. On the contrary, argues Hancox: the crowd had been largely peaceful until the police kettled them.

Kettling is a public order tactic whereby protesters are, as Hancox puts it, “surrounded by riot police with shields, truncheons and body armour… in a confined space without food, water or toilet facilities”. After five hours, the kettle opened and Hancox thought he was free. Instead, demonstrators were herded towards Westminster Bridge where more police were waiting. Colleagues chased other demonstrators from the rear. Germans have a word for it: wanderkessel, a forced march to another kettle. “The forced march to the bridge marked the transition from a kind of open-air pigpen to what was suddenly, terrifyingly, a battery cage,” writes Hancox.

For five more hours, he and others were trapped. Waist-high walls barely protected people from tumbling into the icy Thames. Hancox reports that protesters suffered respiratory problems and chest pains. One female student told the Observer she felt “like I’d been in a car accident”.

The political epiphany that Hancox experienced that night catalysed this book. In it, he champions the erotic, capitalism-subverting, ego-transcending crowd against those who – from Peterloo to illegal M25 raves, from Orgreave to the poll tax riots – have striven to batter the life out of it.

His nemesis is Gustave Le Bon, the army officer who in 1871 saw the Palais des Tuileries burn during the Paris Commune and ascribed what he saw as destructive madness to a new phenomenon, the crowd. The crowd typified the rising force of the masses which he thought must be resisted by any means necessary. His bestselling pseudo-scientific 1895 book, The Crowd, with its dubious notion of social contagion whereby law-abiding citizens get driven to violence by exposure to those with whom they’re in physical proximity, was taken seriously by Freud, while its fear of upstart proles resonated for social conservatives. It was also embraced by Mussolini and Goebbels as they choreographed fascist crowds to cement what psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich diagnosed as their sado-masochistic appeal. The latter were forerunners to Trump’s Capitol rioters, if better drilled and with smarter uniforms.

Hancox recalls a lone shout he heard inside that Westminster Bridge kettle. “This is not,” called out an earnest adolescent, “what democracy looks like.”

Perhaps by contrast, Hancox suggests, the crowd is the emblem of, and blueprint for, what a really democratic society might look like. His sense is that most of us have become exploitable assets passively bingeing Netflix, freely supplying personal data to be monetised by billionaire tech bros and so cognitively diminished that we are scarcely able to know what democracy is, still less realise it.

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For Hancox, lockdown presented an intimation of what life would be like without crowds, without serendipitously brushing up against strangers and having, thereby, our prejudices challenged. Crowds, he thinks, are a more necessary antidote to political and social reality than ever.

A confession: I don’t like crowds. I didn’t mind lockdown. Glastonbury alienates me. Reading Hancox’s hymn to the collective joy of supporting AFC Wimbledon made me remember how stadiums have put me up close and personal with some of the racist, misogynistic foul-mouthed muppets I spend the rest of my life avoiding. I feel about political demonstrations as the Australian comedian and writer Hannah Gadsby felt about Sydney’s Pride parade – sympathetic but happier in Tasmania.

For all that, I enjoyed Hancox’s description of one crowd. His poetic account of getting more than 30,000 steps each day of the Notting Hill carnival as he strolled soca-seething streets, feeling an interpersonal fondness that I might do well to cultivate, was blindsidingly touching.

The crowds that Hancox champions are, in this sense, antidotes to the modern world. They’re not consumable products but transformative experiences that you collaborate in making. Crowds show a different way of being, freer than one predicated on personal utility maximisation. The powers that be – from Gustave Le Bon to David Cameron to whoever’s running the Met – don’t get that.

For the average reader who loves getting lost in books, there’s usually no reason to pay much attention to the shifts occurring in the industry that undergirds their passion. But that doesn’t mean that the tremors that are regularly rumbling through the book trade won’t lead to tectonic shifts that transform the books we love. For example, it may not matter this week, or next week, that Americans are reading fewer books, or that last year the Justice Department blocked a merger of two of the five largest publishers; but both of these facts will ultimately shape which books end up in readers’ hands. In his magnificent new book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Dan Sinykin, an assistant professor of English at Emory University, traces how changes to the publishing industry have also driven changes to the fiction we read. In September 2023 Dan and I chatted about some of these changes, and what they mean for conglomerate publishers and for nonprofit independent publishers that are inventing new ways to publish in the shadows of the giants. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

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Clayton Childress (CC): In Big Fiction you rely on a truly impressive depth of research and engaging storytelling to explain the twists and turns of US fiction. Something that struck me is that when it comes to fiction and changes in fiction, we almost always think of authors. Be they authors we love or hate, we assign them with a superhuman ability to drive trends and changes in publishing. That’s not quite right, though. How is the story you tell in Big Fiction different from that more standard, author-centered story?

 

Dan Sinykin (DS): You’re right. We love authors! We love the fantasy of creative people sequestered in solitude to craft stories for us. It’s a fantasy with a strong hold over us, a fantasy upheld by profiles, biopics, and listicles, all undergirded by the expansive business of marketing and publicity. But it is just that: a fantasy, a myth, and one that’s convenient for capitalism. An author’s photo is more appealing to the consumer than the publisher’s colophon.

Lots of people contribute to the books we read. Editors, of course, though there’s an omertà on them saying so, so much so it’s comical. Editors contort themselves to insist they only serve the author’s vision. This is a disingenuous professional credo exemplified—and, arguably, institutionalized—by Maxwell Perkins, who shaped fiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe but severely minimized his role.

In the 1970s, literary agents and marketing departments became more involved in making books. Revolutions in format (mass-market books), wholesaling (Ingram), and retailing (B. Dalton and Waldenbooks) expanded and transformed audiences for books, creating new and different incentives for publishers. And publishers—previously small and owned, often, by the founders or their heirs—were swept into multinational conglomerates governed by shareholder value, demanding quarterly growth.

Authorship—responsibility for the words we read in the pages of our books—is distributed widely across these figures and forces.

Big Fiction concerns this conglomerate era, which begins in 1960, matures in the 1980s, and continues today. I found that, if we look beyond just “authors”—if we also take into account agents, scouts, editors, marketers, managers of subsidiary rights, wholesalers, distributors, and retailers—we end up with something like a conglomerate superorganism: conglomerate authorship.

It’s an extremely difficult phenomenon to keep in view because English grammar privileges individual agents over distributed forces. But I do my best!

 

CC: That’s such an interesting observation about English grammar. And this totally dovetails, as you write about in Big Fiction, with the emphasis in fiction on the embodiment and perceptions of individuals, and with the rise in the late 20th century of what’s referred to as autofiction (fiction that’s not shy about drawing from the author’s identity, experiences, and life).

What’s the story behind how the distributed cognition of the “conglomerate superorganism” ends up driving a rise of something as self-referential as autofiction?

 

DS: What could seem more personal, more individual, more author-centered than autofiction? In Ben Lerner’s 10:04, the protagonist, Ben, even sequesters in solitude—on a residency in Marfa—to write. In fact, Ben wonders the same thing you do, Clayton! Within the pages of the novel, he asks why a big New York publisher paid him a strong six-figure advance to write an autofictional art novel. Seems like a bad investment!

Why is autofiction such a buzzy genre in the conglomerate era? But the mystery dissolves if we think in terms of the conglomerate superorganism: the collective constraints, incentives, and intentions distributed among so many figures.

We—consumers—love authors! We love gossip. We love to get behind the scenes. That’s why biography and memoir perpetually sell. Autofiction incarnates the figure from the author photo (carefully shot to be intriguing by specialized author photographers, such as Marion Ettlinger and Nina Subin). The last thing the conglomerate superorganism wants is for its books to be recognized for what they are: industrial products.

The conglomerate superorganism wants to hide. And there’s no better screen for it to hide behind than autofiction, which testifies to the creative, expressive individual author whose name is emblazoned on the cover. Meanwhile, the author becomes a channel, a vessel, expressing not personal genius but conglomerate desire.

But of course the last thing the author wants is to become a conglomerate vessel! Autofiction is good here, too. The author gets to write about herself writing, being an author in the world, having agency. It’s a grasp for control in a publishing context where authors keep ceding it—a kind of structural defensiveness, revealing generalized anxiety.

 

CC: It’s fascinating in that in carving out intellectual space from the big institution of conglomerate publishing, authors maintain their subjectivity while ceding the object of attention to the institution itself; the author is an agentic figure, but, in her fiction, her topic is being an agentic figure within the mothership of a conglomerate publisher.

Yet Big Fiction is far from a screed about the horrors of conglomerate publishing. While publishing is a big, slow-moving institution, it’s an inhabited institution—as people around my parts like to say—and the actions and reactions of individuals to that institution ultimately end up reshaping it.

Who were some of your favorite people to research for Big Fiction? What changes or shifts in big publishing did they contribute to?

 

DS: Oh gosh, I love this question. First, please let me share a quote from your book, Under the Cover, that guided my process. Updating Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, you write, “down in the dirt, rather than action in any given situation always being automatic, to participate in a field regularly requires deliberation: people have to figure out if the rules apply to a situation, and if they do, which of the rules are the ones that apply, and how they do apply or not.” Conglomerate authorship is made up of its parts.

People are strange and sometimes unpredictable. Because of this, much of my book is dedicated to bringing these people to life to show how they took action, leading to our contingent world of books: this one, rather than any other.

And publishing history is full of characters: self-mythologizers, charming weirdos, horrible cads. There’s Jane Friedman, the publicist who liked to tell people she invented the author tour. (She didn’t.) She started as a typist at Random House in 1967 when it was a terribly sexist place. Bennett Cerf, the company president, would come by and pull her ponytail. She sent Julia Child on a spectacular tour—“We had parted the Red Sea. Julia made mayonnaise in a blender. We sold 500 books”—and rose through the ranks, like so many women of her generation, from marginalized “publicity gal” to executive, culminating in a tenure as the CEO of HarperCollins. She was a major force in the expansion of marketing and publicity departments.

There’s Morton Janklow, the corporate securities lawyer whose friend was having trouble with his publisher over his positive book about Richard Nixon. The publisher acquired it before Watergate and was feeling queasy about publishing it afterward. So Janklow put the screws to the publisher—and loved it, so he became a literary agent. He changed what it meant to be a literary agent. Before Janklow, no one knew the extent of legal power writers had but had let lay fallow. Here came big advances, big auctions, big money—for the elite few.

There’s Sessalee Hensley, mysterious Sessalee Hensley. She’s difficult to find much information about, though everybody talked about her in awed tones. For a period in the 1990s and 2000s, Hensley, as Barnes & Noble’s chief fiction buyer, vied with Oprah as the most consequential person in books. “If you talked to a publisher in the early 2000s,” Keith Gessen wrote, “chances are they would complain to you about the tyranny of Sessalee.” She was like Madonna, a one-name figure: everyone just called her Sessalee. She showed the influence that retail could have on publishers, who learned to anticipate her judgments.

I’ll stop there or else I’d go on and on. I loved the people so much I added a glossary to the end of Big Fiction with dozens of micro-biographies, sometimes highlighting curious little bits I learned about someone along the way.

An author’s photo is more appealing to the consumer than the publisher’s colophon.

CC: It’s funny in that we’re always pushed to try to write for a variety of imagined readers, but it’s the little things in books that it seems like authors might be partially doing for themselves—like your micro-biographies—that really make a text feel lived in and like an object of affection.

You have a really wonderful extended profile of someone I wasn’t familiar with, Jim Sitter, and after reading about him I couldn’t believe I didn’t know about him before. Who is Jim Sitter and what have been his contributions to the contemporary world of big fiction?

 

DS: Jim Sitter! Jim Sitter. An incredible story. It’s probably fair to say that Jim Sitter did more than anyone else to launch the nonprofit literature movement in the United States. Conglomeration intensified in the late 1970s and it freaked out literary people. The Authors Guild held a press conference in 1977 calling on the Department of Justice to break up the conglomerates. The Senate held a hearing about it in 1980. Later that year, Thomas Whiteside published an expansive three-part exposé in the New Yorker about how conglomeration eviscerated the midlist in favor of blockbusters. Everyone worried that conglomeration would rationalize literature right out of existence. Meanwhile in Minneapolis, Jim Sitter was running Bookslinger, a book distributor that he bought for $400 over a meal at a Mexican restaurant. He saw a story in the paper about how a local theater got grants from Dayton Hudson and General Mills to put on Ntozake Shange’s play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. He had the play in his warehouse, so he picked up a copy to see if anyone had funded the book. No one had. So he decided to find out why not and what it would take to change that. If literature could be funded like dance, symphonies, and theater, it could evade the conglomerate prioritization of the bottom line—and the aesthetic consequences that follow.

Sitter did his research. He figured out who funded the arts in Minnesota. He made himself known to them. He found himself at dinner with the design curator of the Walker Art Center, Martin Friedman, and Toni Morrison, both of whom sat on the National Council for the Arts. When he felt he’d laid the groundwork he brought in publishers: Coffee House, Graywolf, Milkweed. These worked, but Sitter’s ambitions were bigger, national, utopian. He moved to New York to run the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, where he acquired millions of dollars from Andrew W. Mellon and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund for the Minnesota nonprofits but also Arte Público, Copper Canyon, Dalkey Archive, and others. Those grants launched nonprofit literature as a movement. Today it’s a thriving sector, with all the presses named above, plus Archipelago, Deep Vellum, Hub City, Kaya Press, The New Press, Sarabande, Transit Books, and many more.

At the end of writing the book, I felt I should meet Sitter in person. I flew to Minnesota to check some final details in the archives, then met him, at his suggestion, at an old school white tablecloth supper club called the Monte Carlo. Everyone knew him. They gave us a private dining room. Sitter spread documents across a big table for show-and-tell. The server provided an ample martini service. It was two in the afternoon.

CC: You found the anachronistic three-martini lunch still kicking around in the world of nonprofit book publishing! I have to say, a more flattering or less deeply researched book would argue that nonprofit publishers are all that is good and are here to save our souls from the conglomerate behemoths. That’s a very familiar story, and (ironically) probably a very saleable story too, but the one you tell is more complicated.

While nobody complains when a writer pantomimes a Cathy cartoon while resignedly sighing about capitalism, your research on nonprofits doesn’t paint them in a much better light when it comes to fiduciary motives. And yet at the same time they’re responsible for some incredibly necessary and important changes in the world of big fiction. Can you tell us this story?

 

DS: When I began research on the book, I found this same narrative over and over: conglomeration is bad for literature, nonprofits and independents are good. People have been repeating this story for decades, often in the same terms, often without knowing the depth of this history. With Big Fiction, I’m trying to look closely at what happened in the industry and what the aesthetic and institutional consequences have been while bracketing judgment.

But we could challenge the binary immediately by noting that conglomerates publish some incredible fiction by the likes of Rachel Cusk, Lauren Groff, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead, among many others. And nonprofits, though many do fabulous work, publish their share of duds.

More interesting is to consider how nonprofit publishing entails its own financial, institutional, and, subsequently, aesthetic constraints. In the book, I look at the (really quite recent) history of government funding of the arts and, separately, the history of tax-exempt donations to arts nonprofits. If you’re a nonprofit publisher and you subsist thanks to the good graces of politicians and wealthy people, you can never forget that you need to keep the right politicians and wealthy people happy. You have oversight from a board that often includes some of the most munificent donors. And you have a mission that codifies the tacit contract between funders and publisher and that provides a remit for acquisition. For early nonprofits such as Coffee House, Graywolf, and Milkweed, emerging in the mid-1980s, those missions gestured toward literariness and multiculturalism.

I’m particularly interested in the implications of these constraints for writers of color who face a structural dilemma. If a nonprofit mission includes mention of diversity or multiculturalism, writers of color inevitably serve the nonprofit as writers of color: an inescapable tokenism. Writers of color, in turn, responded, often, in one of two ways: they ironized identitarianism in their fiction, poking fun at their own usefulness to white liberals, as in Percival Everett’s Erasure and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange; or they explored the historical, linguistic, and political conditions that make it possible to think in identitarian terms in the first place, as in David Treuer’s Native American Fiction and Yamashita’s I Hotel.

Nonprofits escape one kind of constraint (the market) in exchange for another (funders). I don’t say this to diminish the work of nonprofits—not at all! But we do everyone a favor by refusing to romanticize and by acknowledging the material reality that shapes the books we read.

 

CC: I think that’s quite right. We do everyone a disservice—our subjects, our readers, ourselves—by reducing structure into moral psychodrama.

Another hoary false binary occurs between what gets called “literary” and “genre” fiction. How old are these labels actually, and how has the big fiction era turned the idea of them on its head?

 

DS: Aha. I was surprised to learn just how recently “genre fiction” and “literary fiction” entered circulation. Earlier this year, Andrew Goldstone charted the history of the genre system in the US in Book History. The farthest back he could trace the phrase “genre fiction” was the 1970s.

People didn’t talk about “literary fiction” until the 1980s. Why so late? It was only under conglomeration that they became necessary. I’ll explain.

The prehistory of genre fiction and literary fiction has everything to do with distribution, economics, and format. Before World War II, what we now call genre fiction was largely cordoned off into pulp magazines for mystery, romance, science fiction, and Western. The pulps were distributed everywhere across the US to drugstores and railroad stations. Meanwhile, bookstores were relatively rare, concentrated in urban centers on the East Coast.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the mass-market book format proliferated wildly, taking advantage of magazine distribution and cannibalizing the readers of the pulps. But mass-market books didn’t only publish genre fiction. They brought modernism to the masses. They slapped smutty covers on Faulkner’s Sanctuary and sold a million copies. James Baldwin, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer were celebrities. Even Thomas Pynchon’s V. sold 200,000 copies. “It used to be thought that ‘serious writing’ and ‘best-sellers’ were mutually exclusive categories,” wrote Malcolm Cowley in 1954. “The popular book never had literary merit, and the work of distinction would never be popular. The paperback experiment has destroyed that superstition.” This was all undergirded by the postwar boom, one of the greatest periods of growth in the history of capitalism.

Everything changed in the 1970s. Inflation, unemployment, and wage stagnation ate into discretionary budgets at the same time that new conglomerate owners began demanding rationalization from their publishing holdings: comparative titles, profit-and-loss forms, quarterly growth, the rise of literary agents and marketing and publicity departments.

At the same time, a guy in Tennessee named Harry Hoffman revolutionized wholesaling for a company called Ingram: now booksellers could order and get books much more dependably, efficiently, and quickly than when they had to order directly from publishers, establishing the infrastructure to make it easier to run a bookstore.

This was the decade of the suburban shopping mall, which began to house B. Dalton and Waldenbooks. Who shopped at suburban malls? Suburban moms with their kids. Publishers discovered that they could sell romance and a new genre, fantasy, in previously unimagined numbers—in all formats: hard, paper, and mass-market. “Genre fiction” had differentiated itself. But what was its obverse?

The same economic conditions diminished possibilities for what Cowley called “the work of distinction.” The late 1970s and early 1980s were a tough time for serious fiction. Waldenbooks typically only bought stock from titles with print runs of at least 20,000 copies: unlikely for most serious fiction in hardcover.

What happened was Gary Fisketjon, a Random House editor, started a trade paperback line called Vintage Contemporaries, made it splashy with seductive uniform covers, and published originals, leading with his college pal Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City. “When I came into the business in the late 70s,” Fisketjon told an interviewer, “[literary writers] couldn’t even get published because they sold so poorly in hardcover they never even went into paperback. There was a backlog of very good writers who were wildly under-published for a period of years. It was a good time for a kid to come into it because you had a lot of very accomplished writers to choose from.” This—Vintage Contemporaries—was “literary fiction.”

It’s, as you say, a hoary false binary! When conglomerates started shipping out genre series to the malls in the 1980s, they were putting their big heavy finger on the scale—on behalf of one side of an internecine conflict within genre between artists and hacks. Raymond Chandler versus Erle Stanley Gardner. Ursula Le Guin versus Lester del Rey.

Soon—consequently—literary fiction would find value in adapting genre techniques. Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Joan Didion’s The Last Thing He Wanted. Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn. Colson Whitehead’s Zone One. The winds of prestige and popularity are always shifting, given complex economic pressures.

 

CC: I’m curious about publishing models more abstractly, particularly given the dynamics of prestige and popularity and how frequently those winds are changing. We’re familiar with the problems of commercialism and market fealty. But the usual alternative to that is in some ways also bad, and in other ways maybe even worse: again and again you end up with an insular network of favor-trading elites, who use seductively romantic ideals to justify their social closure.

Who are the publishers I should be excited about? What models (that aren’t these models!) are they using?

 

DS: It’s true, whether conglomerate or nonprofit, publishing reproduces our society’s grotesque inequality.

A writer is much more likely to have success if they attend an Ivy League university for undergrad or one of a handful of the most highly respected creative writing programs for their MFA. These schools situate writers in the right networks and train them in the right sociolects to succeed in the literary field. Most major publishers only accept submissions from literary agents. Editors have stronger relationships with some agents than others, and those agents with the best relationships with successful editors are at the top of the agenting hierarchy, many of whom don’t accept queries.

It can seem impossible to break through if you weren’t born in one of the few zip codes that set you on an elite path from birth. It works this way because of the problem of abundance: there are more aspiring writers sending work than agents and editors can read, so they use established hierarchies to filter for them.

What you want, then, are publishers that invite open, unagented submissions. These might be nonprofits or independents, but either way, they’ll read what you send. Most of these are small and have a niche—a niche that serves as a filter to keep them from receiving tens of thousands of submissions. Hub City is a great nonprofit in Spartanburg, South Carolina, run by Meg Reid, dedicated to “finding and spotlighting extraordinary new and unsung writers from the American South.” Deep Vellum is a dynamic nonprofit publisher based in Dallas, Texas, run by Will Evans, which does both hyperlocal literature and amazing translations from around the world. Dorothy: A Publishing Project is a feminist press that publishes two slender volumes each year. Sublunary Editions started in 2019 by sending new writing to subscribers in envelopes and now publishes ten to twelve volumes per year. Akashic occasionally has open submissions. It is “dedicated to publishing urban literary fiction and political nonfiction by authors who are either ignored by the mainstream, or who have no interest in working within the ever-consolidating ranks of the major corporate publishers.” Belt is a worker-owned and women-led publisher focused on “smart narrative and serious nonfiction on any topic, as well as commercial fiction with a regional foothold.” Anne Trubek, Belt’s founder and publisher, has deep knowledge about publishing and writes a popular newsletter about the industry.

The Big Five and their many imprints suck up so much of the oxygen that it can be difficult for these alternative presses to breathe. But, amazingly, breathe they do. In truth, they are flourishing. I think we live in a great moment for small presses trying to do things differently. They’re there, if we look for them, creating a more equitable and imaginatively expansive world of books.

 

CC: There’s a weird phenomenon in which markets get consolidated and big enough that a space opens for little players to innovate and experiment, because the big fish are too big to even notice it or care. It sounds like the world of big fiction has some really exciting small fiction in it too.

Let’s close on a two-parter: first, what’s one thing we haven’t covered that you think we could or should have covered, and second, what’s your recommendation for a piece of creative art (a novel, song, show, anything really) that you think more people should know about and love?

 

DS: One day, in the reading room of Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I had to repeatedly lean over and scoop my jaw off the floor. I was reading through Bennett Cerf’s correspondence. He was a cofounder and longtime president of Random House. In letter after letter, he wrote with cartoonish sexism.

If he was writing to a man, he commented on his (the recipient’s) wife’s body; if he was writing to a woman, he commented on hers. He told one guy he wanted to give his wife a “potch.” He told Olivia de Havilland how much he appreciated her “fanny” and added that, despite his age, his molars still work fine. (She had asked about the finances of a book of hers.) Under Cerf, and continuing after his death in 1971, Random House—arguably, with its imprints, the most important publisher in the US, then as now—was a terribly sexist place, with consequences, of course, for women writers, not least in terms of the policing of their aesthetics. In Big Fiction, I write about how three of Random House’s leading women writers in the period—Renata Adler, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Alison Lurie—navigated that sexism and reinvented the novel.

And now it’s time to reveal a bit about my habitus to the sociologist! Though her back covers say “EVERYONE READS DANIELLE STEEL,” I suspect that’s not true for most readers of Public Books, who, if I had to guess, struggle to decide where to start. After all, she has published more than 140 novels, adding more, lately, at the rate of seven per year. I recommend her 1998 science fiction comedy, The Klone and I, in which a middle-aged divorcée ends up in a love triangle with the head of a Silicon Valley startup and his clone.

In a similar vein, I recommend Fran Ross’s 1974 novel, Oreo—tied with Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts for the funniest book I’ve read. Though it has been celebrated by Mat Johnson, Harryette Mullen, and Scott Saul, far too few people have read it. It’s a picaresque quest about a woman with a Black mother who sets out in search of her Jewish father. It’s linguistically electric. It has more zingers than a pallet of boxes of Hostess Zingers. Unlike Steel, Ross wrote just the one book. It didn’t sell and quickly went out of print so she found work writing jokes for Richard Pryor.

Let me have one more. As an Americanist (scholar) and an American (citizen), I’m provincial, and only recently learned about Henry Green’s 1939 English novel Party Going, republished in 2017 in an elegant edition by NYRB. It’s about a woman who sees a pigeon die on a foggy day at the railway station and decides she needs to give the dead bird a wash in the public restroom. Bad things ensue.

 

CC: Those Bennett Cerf stories in Big Fiction were shocking. And thank you for these recommendations!

As for my recommendation, I wouldn’t say the following unless it was entirely sincere. Dear Reader, you should read Big Fiction. It’s the best treatment of why fiction is the way it is that I’ve ever read. And the stories too!

With all sincerity: as I write this it is 2:19 p.m., and this is the third time I’ve recommended Big Fiction today. It’s that good. 

Featured photograph courtesy of Dan Sinykin.