Reading in the Conglomerate Era: Do Small Presses Even Exist?

WHEN THE NOVELIST Cormac McCarthy died in June 2023, Dan Sinykin published a short essay in The New York Times that teased the argument of his forthcoming monograph Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature. McCarthy’s celebrated career “was made possible,” Sinykin wrote, “by a tectonic shift that was happening in the publishing industry as it moved from the boutique model of the early 20th century to an era of conglomeration.” This era—in which media companies and book publishers acquired each other, merged, and conglomerated—brought us the current “Big Five” that dominate US book publishing: five profit-driven multinational media corporations, with Penguin Random House the largest by far, where there was once a landscape of myriad independent houses.