Literature and Publishing, 1945–2020

An author of obscure fiction finds that publishers only want novels from him that foreground his race. He writes what he thinks is a bad, hyperbolic parody, featuring a lurid, racist caricature of Black life—a send up of the sort of fiction he refuses to write—only to have it championed as earnest and true by publishers and prize committees. A different author, a renowned young poet, wonders why, given the skimpy sales of his first novel, publishing houses clamor for his second. They offer him a “strong six-figure advance” based on nothing more than a half-baked book proposal and a short story published in the New Yorker (Lerner 4). Unable to figure out how to write the proposed novel, he begins with the story of the advance as its motivating event. A third author, a mathematician hoping to sell a book of what he calls “robot tales,” asks his “hot shot literary agent” whether the editors he might work with are numerate, only to be told that “we could waste a lot of time talking about editors. We’re only interested in the ones who are willing to buy the book we have to sell” (DeWitt 29, 36).

These are not true stories but fictions that have been widely discussed, written by authors who have been critically celebrated: Percival Everett’s Erasure (2001), Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014), and one of the stories from Helen DeWitt’s Some Trick: Thirteen Stories (2018). These stories reflect, in more and less veiled forms, experiences of their real authors. They make the institutional life of literary production the subject of literary art. In all three cases, authors are pitted against middlemen whose incentives distort their purposes by placing extrinsic demands on their art. These narratives, and many more like them, tell what seem to be familiar stories about the effort—by these characters, by these authors—to secure a zone of relative autonomy within a rapacious mass marketplace. We might recall how, in his discussion of the question of whether those who participate in the literary field were cynical, Pierre Bourdieu once suggested that Stéphane Mallarmé had found a surprising way to “utter the truth about a field which excludes the publishing of its own truth” (116). These contemporary US authors, on one level, do the same. Like Mallarmé, they reveal the rules of the field on which they are forced to play, yet nonetheless successfully operate by those very rules. Unlike Mallarmé, whose revelation of the game also played the game by deploying an ingenious logic of exposé—by committing itself to the literary form of sacrilegious exposure— these writers are not particularly scandalous. Indeed, they are almost wearily resigned in their discussion of the conditions within which they are made to write.¹ In an age when we purportedly dabble in “Too Much Sociology,” when we are said to habitually trade in a ubiquitous and corrosive cynical reason, exposing the mechanisms of publishing is among the most generic or recognized gestures of contemporary American literature.² Such exposés fail now to arouse any felt sense of transgression.³ We are more likely to read them as clever or funny or cute or even gimmicky.

In purporting to publish the truth of the field they operate in, these authors demonstrate how the publishing field has become a key yet mundane interpretive horizon for twenty-first-century literature. To be sure, it is no new thing for writers to write about publishing.⁴ But in an era when literary authors find themselves, like creative workers, freelancers, and gig economy workers, charged with managing their individual portfolios of human capital, it should come as no surprise that the vexed management of one’s literary career—the deal making, the firing and hiring of agents, the uncomfortable phone call with your editor, the numbing effect of discovering the big-box retailer has put your book on the wrong shelf—might become a commonplace subject for literary art.⁵ These stories are partial, told from the perspective of authors shaped by the deals the...