Dan Sinykin’s “Big Fiction”

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Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher are joined by writer and professor Dan Sinykin. His new book is called Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry, which chronicles the many changes publishing has undergone in the past 50 years, starting in 1965 when Random House was bought by an electronics company. Since then we’ve seen the radical conglomeration of publishing, as small independent houses were bought up by multinational companies, slowly forming the Big Five. Dan writes about the way these changes affected the books we read—what editors buy, what readers expect, and even, what writers write. He covers everything from the rise of mass-market paperbacks to the establishment of prestigious non-profits, hoping to protect literature from the market.

Also, Dorothea Lasky, whose new collection of poems is called The Shining, returns to recommend two books: Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and Hermetic Definition by H.D.