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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Review Article|
June 01 2025
The Broom of the System: Literary Sociology, Contemporary Publishing, and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction Available to Purchase
Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature
. By Dan Sinykin. New York
: Columbia University Press
, 2023
. xii + 313
pp. Hereafter cited as BF.
Jeremy Rosen
Jeremy Rosen is associate professor of English at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in ASAP/Journal, New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Post45. He is the author of Minor Characters Have Their Day: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace (2016). His second book, Genre Bending: The Plasticity of Form in Contemporary Literary Fiction, is forthcoming.
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Modern Language Quarterly (2025) 86 (2): 201–226.
Citation
Jeremy Rosen; The Broom of the System: Literary Sociology, Contemporary Publishing, and Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction. Modern Language Quarterly 1 June 2025; 86 (2): 201–226. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-11638104
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