It seems likely that Dan Sinykin felt gratified to read R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, which appeared several months prior to Sinykin’s much-talked-about new book. Kuang’s novel mounts a wicked satire of the contemporary literary marketplace, especially the racial politics of corporate publishers, who leverage “subaltern voices” and “suppressed narratives” from attractive minority writers as a form of product differentiation but are equally happy to publish scandalous works of racially insensitive cultural appropriation, à la Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt (2020), since conservative readers gobble up anything that infuriates the libs, and “controversy of any sort is pretty good for free marketing” (Kuang 2023: 91, 218). Yellowface reads like a narrativization of many of the dynamics of conglomerate publishing that Sinykin outlines in his book, which is full of entertaining anecdotes based on prodigious research that foreground the industry’s behind-the-scenes players, such as writers, agents, editors, marketing teams, and bookstore...

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