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Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
by
40/99
Critics
10/99
Readers
n/a
Scholars
4/99
Rating
77/99
Volume
5/99
Rating
14/99
Volume
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About This Book
How Amazon has changed literature As the story goes, Jeff Bezos left a lucrative job to start something new in Seattle after being deeply affected by Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day. If a novel gave us Amazon, what has Amazon meant for the novel? In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl discovers a dynamic scene of cultural experimentation in literature. Its innovations have little to do with how the novel is written and more to do with how it's distributed online. On the internet, all fiction becomes genre fiction, which is simply another way to predict customer satisfaction. With an eye on the longer history of the novel, this witty, acerbic book tells a story that connects Henry James to E. L. James, and Faulkner and Hemingway to contemporary romance, science fiction and fantasy writers. Reclaiming several works of self-published fiction from the gutter of complete critical disregard, it stages a copernican revolution in how we understand the world of letters: it's the stuff of high literature—Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, and Amitav Ghosh—that revolves around the star of countless unknown writers trying to forge a career by untraditional means, adult baby diaper lover erotica being just one fortuitous route. In opening the floodgates of popular literary expression as never before, the age of Amazon shows a democratic promise, as well as what it means when literary culture becomes corporate culture in the broadbest but also deepest and most troubling sense.
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Reviews
"Everything and Less will speak to those who submerge themselves—whether as writers or readers, entrepreneurs or customers—into the KDP landscape, while offering much to think about."
"We might call it a Sedgwickian aesthetics by nonce taxonomy: his precise terms of evaluation emerge uniquely to each text."
"While McGurl's dense academic study often relies on sprawling, jargon-filled sentences, he nevertheless raises significant questions about the state of publishing."
"The reductiveness of McGurl's arguments, like laws of physics but for culture, doesn't hamper their utility or their accuracy: He usually seems right ..."
"For all the ways McGurl anatomizes the novel as a commodity in the age of Amazon, one is left observing something else entirely—all the ways in which the novel cannot be commodified."
"Placing Amazon's story alongside those within the books it distributes, McGurl reduces fictional plots to allegories of the tech behemoth."
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