A review by balkeyeston
Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl
2.0
What if you took the most pretentious person in the literary community and forced him to write about the state of the novel in the Amazonian marketplace? The product you might find would likely be this book.
I don't like writing negative reviews at all, but I felt it might be wise to recommend folks to another title (or titles...or just creep around on Google and Amazon all the time like me) that cover/s this subject area with a less conceited air.
There are a few great novels well worth analyzing that have risen through the ranks of the Amazon market and KDP, but McGurl doesn't cover any of them. He prefers to navel-gaze at the lost art of high-brow prose and cite Fifty Shades of Grey every chance he can get, rather than mention other hard-hitting examples such as:
· Andy Weir's online debut of The Martian,
· further contemporary literary works that are packaged as once-in-a-lifetime Instagram pop-ups (looking at you, Beautiful World...),
· the production and publishing structures of KDP/Little A/other Amazon imprints,
· the rise of Bookshop as the more socialist interconnected alternative to book-buying, and
· the endless disputes of ebook embargoes between Amazon, libraries, and the big four pubs.
I was quite looking forward to reading this book after having read The Program Era in grad school and how the MFA revolution created a whole literary industrial pipeline of white male banality. It seems as if McGurl was thrown a lot of money to research how Amazon is infiltrating the book publishing world, and all he spent it on was a butt-load of ebooks to read and call research in itself.
And no, this review won't tank his spot here on Goodreads (not that it matters to him), so I'm not losing sleep over bringing up the book's failings here. Until another book comes around, it looks like Merchants of Culture will have to suffice...
I don't like writing negative reviews at all, but I felt it might be wise to recommend folks to another title (or titles...or just creep around on Google and Amazon all the time like me) that cover/s this subject area with a less conceited air.
There are a few great novels well worth analyzing that have risen through the ranks of the Amazon market and KDP, but McGurl doesn't cover any of them. He prefers to navel-gaze at the lost art of high-brow prose and cite Fifty Shades of Grey every chance he can get, rather than mention other hard-hitting examples such as:
· Andy Weir's online debut of The Martian,
· further contemporary literary works that are packaged as once-in-a-lifetime Instagram pop-ups (looking at you, Beautiful World...),
· the production and publishing structures of KDP/Little A/other Amazon imprints,
· the rise of Bookshop as the more socialist interconnected alternative to book-buying, and
· the endless disputes of ebook embargoes between Amazon, libraries, and the big four pubs.
I was quite looking forward to reading this book after having read The Program Era in grad school and how the MFA revolution created a whole literary industrial pipeline of white male banality. It seems as if McGurl was thrown a lot of money to research how Amazon is infiltrating the book publishing world, and all he spent it on was a butt-load of ebooks to read and call research in itself.
And no, this review won't tank his spot here on Goodreads (not that it matters to him), so I'm not losing sleep over bringing up the book's failings here. Until another book comes around, it looks like Merchants of Culture will have to suffice...