Everything and Less

336 pages

English language

Published 2021 by Verso Books.

ISBN:: 978-1-83976-385-4
OCLC Number:: 1229028552

(2 reviews)

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 …

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.

1 edition

Lucas reviewed Everything and Less by Mark McGurl

"The same culture that delivers you a book overnight is the same one that deprives you of the time to read it."

5 stars

Following hot on Big Fiction, I found plenty to think on in Everything and Less, a tangle of economic, literary, sociological insight about fiction, genre, commerce, desire—and ways of talking about Amazon not through business history, but as, for better and for worse, the foremost force in/for literature in the English world (if not many others as well).

I was introduced to a lot of very interesting ideas in literature and, again, as with Big Fiction, added many of the citations here to my to-read. The writing is smart and cheeky, so it's fun to read and to think on.

stale cooper

rated it

March 2, 2023

Subjects

Literature

Lists

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