Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

Product Description

Best Book of Fall (Esquire) and a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 (Lit Hub)What Has Happened to Fiction in the Age of Platform Capitalism?

Since it was first launched in 1994, Amazon has changed the world of literature. The “Everything Store” has not just transformed how we buy books; it has affected what we buy, and even what we read. In
Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl explores this new world where writing is no longer categorized as high or lowbrow, literature or popular fiction.

Charting a course spanning from Henry James to E. L. James, McGurl shows that contemporary writing has less to do with writing per se than with the manner of its distribution. This consumerist logic—
if you like this, you might also like …—has reorganized the  fiction universe so that literary prize-winners sit alongside fantasy, romance, fan fiction, and the infinite list of hybrid genres and self-published works.

This is an innovation to be cautiously celebrated. Amazon’s platform is not just a retail juggernaut but an aesthetic experiment driven by an unseen algorithm rivaling in the depths of its effects any major cultural shift in history. Here all fiction is genre fiction, and the niches range from the categories of crime and science fiction to the more refined interests of Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica.

Everything and Less is a hilarious and insightful map of both the commanding heights and sordid depths of fiction, past and present, that opens up an arresting conversation about why it is we read and write fiction in the first place.

Review

“As Mark McGurl suggests in this deep dive into the ubiquitous reach of ‘the world’s biggest bookstore,’ in the age of Amazon, ‘every novel is a genre novel.’”

—Lit Hub (“Most Anticipated Books of 2021”)

“Provocative … [McGurl] raises significant questions about the state of publishing.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Consumers might find in McGurl’s book a warning to stay as far away as possible and seek out better forms of discovery than Amazon’s website, like visiting an indie bookstore, asking a friend, or reading a magazine-looking for anything but what rises to the top of the feed.”

—New Republic

“McGurl here argues that the retail behemoth that once proudly called itself Earth’s Biggest Bookstore has blurred, to the point of indistinction, the alleged line between literary and genre fiction. Proving, perhaps his point: a visit to Professor McGurl’s book’s page on Amazon leads one to Psions of SPIRE bundle: Vol. 1, a box set of paranormal, LGBTQ-fantasy romances by Alex Silver.”

—Globe and Mail

“In this provocative literary history, McGurl draws a line between Amazon’s distribution model and the dissolution of genre boundaries, arguing that Amazon’s algorithm has effectively turned all fiction into genre fiction. In lucid and well-argued prose, McGurl raises important questions about just where all this disruption is taking us.”

—Esquire (Best Books of Fall 2021)”In the last couple decades, Amazon fundamentally transformed the business of bookselling, changing how customers buy their favorite titles and disrupting supply chains around the world. But how has the company also impacted writing on an aesthetic level? That’s one of the questions driving this study of modern literature from critic and professor Mark McGurl.”

—Thrillist (24 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Fall)”
In Everything and Less, accomplished literary critic Mark McGurl makes the case that the online superstore has also changed the way that we read.”

—The Week (15 books to read this fall)

“Provocative … [McGurl] raises significant questions about the state of publishing.”

—Publishers Weekly

“In
Everything and Less, accomplished literary critic Mark McGurl makes the case that the online superstore has also changed the way that we read.”

—Jeva Lange, The Week

“Consumers might find in McGurl’s book a warning to stay as far away as possible and seek out better forms of discover