Everything and Less - The Novel in the Age of Amazon

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Analyzing fiction's transformation in the digital marketplace.

"Everything and Less" will resonate with you if you're curious about the seismic shifts in literary culture since Amazon's rise. It's a thoughtful dissection of the marketplace and our changing tastes in literature, guided by an omnipresent algorithm that decides what gets read and what remains hidden. Mark McGurl's keen analysis offers a rich perspective that's both enlightening and a bit unsettling for avid readers and writers contemplating the current and future state of the written word.

  • National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Criticism (2021)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Everything and Less - The Novel in the Age of Amazon

Regular price $11.90
Unit price
per
ISBN: 9781839763854
Authors: Mark McGurl
Publisher: Verso
Date of Publication: 2021-10-19
Format: Hardcover
Related Collections: Business, Sociology
Goodreads rating: 3.44
(rated by 171 readers)

Description

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
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Analyzing fiction's transformation in the digital marketplace.

"Everything and Less" will resonate with you if you're curious about the seismic shifts in literary culture since Amazon's rise. It's a thoughtful dissection of the marketplace and our changing tastes in literature, guided by an omnipresent algorithm that decides what gets read and what remains hidden. Mark McGurl's keen analysis offers a rich perspective that's both enlightening and a bit unsettling for avid readers and writers contemplating the current and future state of the written word.

  • National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee for Criticism (2021)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.