They want us to know that a lot of what they contribute to the literary ecosystem is being washed away. The Amazon platform has no use for gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers are perturbed. Yes, McGurl has a commercial publisher, and the prose is lively, and he is giving serious attention to vast swatches of the literary marketplace that tend to be ignored, all of which sets him apart from the garden-variety academic tome, but the primary reason his book is receiving vast coverage is the fear and suspicion of Amazon in the taste-making literary community.Īmazon has bypassed the independent bookstore, replaced the literary critic with star ratings and the promotional review site Goodreads, and thoroughly democratized book distribution-all at mindboggling scale in a tight window of time. What accounts for the unusual attention afforded Everything and Less? His chapter on fetish lit and Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica is already famous, and it lives up to expectations.īut back to the original question. I’m not quite finished the book but I can report that it is rather mesmerizing to follow a well-read and well-trained literary critic as he leaps enthusiastically into the filthy eddies of genre fiction that comprise most of Amazon’s stream. Yet if this decline is in progress it should be detectable in the books themselves, and what is maddening about “Everything and Less” is how little literary analysis it actually contains. Mass production, meanwhile, cheapens the field as a whole, making refinement of craft and subtlety of thought boutique luxuries trending toward obsolescence. McGurl says, the prestige category of literary fiction is merely another genre, judged by the same standards of stars and sales rankings. Authors are pumping out new novels every several months to answer reader demand for short, fast-paced serializations.īut has Amazon really changed the literary novel, apart from maybe hastening its slow retreat from the pedestal it occupied in the middle of the last century? The reviews are mixed.
![killing floor 2 prestige rank 2 killing floor 2 prestige rank 2](https://evonyguidewiki.com/wp-panda/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_3509_wm-576x1024.jpeg)
The content of books in these genres, he argues, is changing to meet the expectations of the platform. He describes how traditional genre fiction-romance, speculative, detective-is the big mover on Amazon’s platform. Or, as he states it, how “the consumerist ethos embodied in Amazon’s commercial practices been internalized in the novel’s form.” Another institution-not capitalism but the workshop-was shaping the novel’s art.Įverything and Less is McGurl’s attempt to chart how Amazon, our largest online retailer, which also happens to be our most prolific publisher of new fiction (albeit mostly of the self-published variety), is again transforming what we read. Raymond Carver, Thomas Pynchon, and Joyce Carol Oates write as they do because of what they learned, and the literary values they adopted, in creative writing workshops. McGurl next published The Program Era, which aimed to demonstrate how the rise of creative writing programs in late-twentieth-century America remade the novel once again. However anti-commercial their shift, McGurl explains it in capitalist terms: the modernists were engaged in an early form of product differentiation, abandoning the masses and taking their product upscale to a better, more exclusive (if less lucrative) market. Disinclined to fill the capitalist maw, the modernists saw themselves as producing aesthetically sophisticated works of art.
![killing floor 2 prestige rank 2 killing floor 2 prestige rank 2](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/killingfloor/images/f/ff/Kf2_prestige_knives_reward.png)
This is something of a long-term project for McGurl, whose earlier book The Novel Art charted the ways in which modern novelists (Dos Passos, Faulkner) self-consciously rebelled against the novel-as-commercial-entertainment ethos of the nineteenth century (Dickens and Thackeray).
![killing floor 2 prestige rank 2 killing floor 2 prestige rank 2](https://gpstatic.com/acache/28/29/3/de/packshot-d7b802e4338bb436c0af3ec48487da73.jpg)
McGurl believes something has happened to fiction “in the age of platform capitalism.” He wants to show that the content of books is affected by how they’re distributed. Let’s look closer, then, at the thesis of Everything and Less. But there are literally thousands of books answering those terms that never break into the big book pages. It also helps that he writes reasonably well, and he’s got an intriguing cover. He’s been released by Verso, a respectable independent house, child of the New Left Review. It helps that McGurl hasn’t been published by an academic press.
![killing floor 2 prestige rank 2 killing floor 2 prestige rank 2](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/q--fgheKAVg/mqdefault.jpg)
Yet here’s an English professor with one of the most discussed books of the season. Generally speaking, authors don’t get that much attention unless they’re members of the Obama family, or literary superstars on the level of Jonathan Franzen, or Philip Roth’s fuck-up of a biographer. It was considered a “best book of Fall” by Esquire and a most anticipated book of 2021 at Lit Hub. In the last few weeks, Everything and Less has been reviewed everywhere: The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Esquire, Monocle, the Nation.