For God's sake, no, Big 5 publishers have not "killed literary fiction"

Some thoughts on the most aggravating publishing take of 2024.

Alas: I’ve just read “The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction”—an article published in Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion—in an unusually uncharitable mood.

Although it’s perhaps the year’s worst publishing take—a real accomplishment in the same year that produced “No One Buys Books”—I would normally at least try to preface my counterpoint with polite disclaimers: I don’t know the authors; this is all just a close reading of a single text for fellow uninvolved third parties interested in the industry; who knows, I’m not omnipotent, I’m just one guy; etc. etc.

NOT TODAY, THOUGH. All of the above are true—I don’t know the authors, and so on—but I am also approaching the end of two weeks’ near-nonstop childcare. My children, bless them, have been winding themselves up on simple carbohydrates and arcade games at a roller rink all afternoon, and now I’m trying to work at 8pm in a hotel room with all three of them, and one of them is jumping up and down making kissy noises eight inches from my face. I AM ALL OUT OF PATIENCE, DENISE.

It is in that spirit that I bring you the following shout-a-thon. What follows is an annotated version of the Persuasion piece, which was co-authored by two people who publish frequently in literary magazines but (as far as I can tell) have not yet actually published any books, commercially or otherwise.

We begin:

Literary fiction is dead. Or, so we’ve been told. Perhaps we can agree it lies bleeding.

Mehhh.

The link above goes to a piece in The Nation by Dan Sinykin, who argues that “literary fiction” is itself a category invented in the 1980s by conglomerate publishing types. The goal was to market aesthetically ambitious, intellectual work heretofore called merely “fiction,” justifying its value to higher-ups and the general public within the confines of an increasingly vicious and streamlined for-profit industry. Sinykin argues that Big 5 publishers have now contorted this marketing term into so many different shapes (literary genre! literary thriller!) as to render it essentially meaningless.

I take no issue with this argument. I also agree that it’s incredibly tough to sell aesthetically daring non-genre fiction to a major commercial publisher absent a really compelling platform and/or comps and/or a proven track record of prior book sales from the author. Almost all of the Big 5 are publicly-traded companies now; they have rather onerous obligations to shareholders. If one wants to publish commercially, one does have to make a commercial pitch.

Still, though: I don’t think artisanal fiction is dead or bleeding out on the ground or whatever, in the Big 5 or anywhere. Martyr!? All Fours? Cahokia Jazz? So SO so many soaring, inventive Big 5 literary novels have come out in the past year, while BookTok and other social media have resurrected some excellent backlist titles.

It’s true that postmodern fiction is pretty dead. Readers are on the whole less taken than they were in, say, 1950-2008 with work that’s incoherent, fragmentary, disembodied, confusing, and endlessly self-referential. Social media and, uh, the planet kind of ruined the appeal. Even the most literary-minded among us are increasingly drawn to metamodern work like Powers’ The Overstory or Mason’s North Woods—work that reaches for transcendence and meaning amidst all this chaos and obliteration. (Penguin Random House even mentioned metamodernism in its trend analysis for Fall ‘24.)

If you think those kind of books aren’t literary because they aren’t cynical, I really don’t know what to say.

It’s convenient to assume that readers are to blame for killing literary fiction, and publishers have abandoned it because book-buyers are stupid, have bad taste, and just aren’t reading anymore. But what has actually occurred is death by committee.

Do we have supporting evidence for this “death by committee” claim—perhaps on-background interviews from editors any one of the Big 5’s many highbrow imprints? You know…from one of any of the places that publish dozens of artistically ambitious novels a year? Someone from Knopf, Random House, Scribner, Riverhead, FSG, or Ecco?

LOL NO. The authors of this piece don’t support their claims with any actual reporting or primary research at all. Why go to the trouble! They don’t even explain what “committees” they imagine are murdering Literature: Sales? Investors? Editorial? I’m guessing editorial, but who knows.

One hundred years ago, there were dozens of publishing houses and a robust publishing landscape. This is the idea of publishing that so many of us still have stored away in our collective memory—a competitive marketplace in which publishers needed to nurture, court, outbid, and out-promise each other in landing both emerging and established writers. This process gave us—among so many others—Flannery O’Connor, Tom Wolfe, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Baldwin.

…Tom Wolfe? The guy who published his first novel in 1968, when the conglomeration era was already well underway? (Also: we’re calling that guy high literature now?)

…Vladimir Nabokov? The guy who published his first nine novels in Russian, then had Lolita turned down by Viking, S&S, New Directions, Farrar Straus, and Doubleday, forcing him to publish with Olympia Press in France? In America, GP Putnam’s eventually bit, but only after they were sufficiently convinced the controversy wouldn’t impact THEIR BOTTOM LINE, HELLO, BECAUSE IT’S ALMOST LIKE FOR-PROFIT PUBLISHERS HAVE ALWAYS THOUGHT ABOUT THAT.