Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon

As the story goes: Jeff Bezos left a lucrative job to start something new in Seattle only after a deeply affecting reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. But if a novel gave us Amazon.com, what has Amazon meant for the novel? In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl discovers a dynamic scene of cultural experimentation in literature, with a confidence that rivals modernism. 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, 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 revolve 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 broad best, but also deepest and most troubling, sense.

About the Author :
Mark McGurl is the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford University. His last book, The Program Era, won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He previously worked for The New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

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." Provocative ... [McGurl] raises significant questions about the state of publishing. In Everything and Less, accomplished literary critic Mark McGurl makes the case that the online superstore has also changed the way that we read. 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. The point here - and I think it's the most profound in McGurl's very entertaining book - is that Amazon is refashioning the novel as an object. Fierce ... Everything and Less enlists literary sources to explain the place of culture in a neoliberal economy. Provocative ... in lucid and well-argued prose, McGurl goes spelunking through the many genres shaped by Amazon's consumerist logic. Intriguing and entertaining ... Everything and Less is a good starting point for a re-consideration of literary production and reading in our times. Engrossing ... McGurl argues that Amazon's outsize role in serving readers' needs has had a profound impact, not just on well-documented matters of retailing and warehousing, but on what we read, and to an extent, the content of the books themselves. [Mark McGurl is] the most exhaustive scholar to track US fiction's myriad paths from Henry James to Chuck Tingle ... a man who has read a lot, and, in the end, very earnestly. Intriguing ... McGurl's object of study is not just the literary Age of Amazon but the place of the novel within it. [McGurl] is attuned to America's signature queasiness about class, pleasure, and mass culture that constellates around reading and education. In Everything and Less, this takes the form of wild anthropological delight as he explores genres, and micro-genres, long dismissed by most mainstream scholarship and criticism. Probing ... Everything and Less will speak to those who submerge themselves-whether as writers or readers, entrepreneurs or customers-into the [Kindle Direct Publishing] landscape, while offering much to think about ... for those who cherish traditional publishing and still place some value in the role that gatekeepers have long played in the book industry. To survey the vast expanse of Amazon's literary domain, McGurl makes frequent excursions into popular genres rarely considered among academics and critics ... prompting a reassessment of the literary center and the literary fringe. Everything and Less offers a sprawling account of the contemporary literary field, now being remade according to the ethos of the megacorporation. McGurl's theory of the novel is a romp, keyed to his compelling account of the genre system as it is being driven by Amazon and refined by Kindle Direct Publishing. McGurl is above all a literary sociologist, and a brilliant one at that: it seems unlikely that any recent or forthcoming book can rival Everything and Less as a survey, at once brashly comprehensive and nimbly speculative, of the contemporary literary world.