Christian Lorentzen brings a Ferrari to the drive-in with this consideration of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction. He’s not taking comments so I’ll leave mine here: I was a bit vexed by the consistent conflation in the book of all commercial incentives in literature with the conglomeration of commercial publishing in the 1980s. Writers have forever had to bend to the demands of the market and indeed the wish to be read is a non-negligible factor among artistic motivations. When George Eliot wrote Middlemarch in installments to juice the readers of Harper’s Weekly it wasn’t just to satisfy the (way ante-conglomerate) editorial bosses. When Didion or Morrison or McCarthy draw on the genres that once made fiction (long before Allen Lane) considered a lesser art, they could have easily been trying to speak to a different public, or to speak through more demotic forms, than be bending to the corporate will. Moving between the poles of the sophisticated and the worldly, drawing different strengths from each, is something art does, back to Chaucer and Shakespeare, and further. Also small publishing has existed forever, serving smaller artistic circles, long before the postwar nonprofit model sprang up to give it a boost.