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Articles by Mark Mcgurl
The Damned Mob of Scribbling Women
Blog post Amid rising fears of AI-driven creative production, Brianna Di Monda interrogates the explosion of fanfiction in mainstream markets, and what it might tell us about the idea of literary value today. A virgin maiden abandons her ceremonial role to hunt vampires with her immortal bodyguard. A woman falls for her faerie kidnapper and goes on a quest to save his kingdom.A war college misfit has eyes for the son of a rival family—and their dragons are mates.
Bad Nostalgia
Early on in my career in publishing, an agent outlined the rules of comparative titles to me. “Comp” titles, as they are known in the industry, are a part of a process by which publishers assess the commercial viability of a book by comparing it to past successes. These comps, the editor explained, must be recent works, generally from the last five years, that generated buzz and sold relatively well (a variable number depending on genre and publishing house).
Social Capital: Epic Fantasy and the Magical School
Social Capital: Epic Fantasy and the Magical School Localización: Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, ISSN-e 2160-0228, ISSN 0016-6928, Vol. 56, Nº. 1, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Thirty Years after John Guillory’s Cultural Capital), págs.
Gertrude Stein's Pulp Fiction
It’s a mystery, really—a paradox or an enigma. Choose a door and it leads to another door. And another. Until, finally, you reach … a locked one. This is puzzling because the pattern is uniformly disrupted. Puzzles are puzzling at the first, when one doesn’t know where to start to begin where the puzzle takes root establishing the scene, piece by (bloody) piece.
New tools for storytellers
Happy Friday: you made it through the week. I'm a bit wiped out today (Thursday night, as I write this): daycare was out, so I was minding the gremlin child. We ended up on a small adventure to Shelburne Farms, a farm nonprofit that's located on some gorgeous land, and took a nice, long walk through the fields and forests. I'm looking forward to going back. This week, I wanted to focus on something a little different — a particular technology behind modern storytelling.
How Amazon is Changing the Books We Read w/ Mark McGurl on Apple Podcasts
49 min Paris Marx is joined by Mark McGurl to discuss how Amazon is reshaping the publishing industry and altering the form of the novel itself. Mark McGurl is a Professor of Literature at Stanford University. He’s also the author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing and Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. Follow Mark on Twitter at @markjamesmcgurl.
Retail Therapy
Culture September 30, 2021 • An excerpt from Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon BY Mark McGurl. Brooklyn, NY: Verso. 336 pages. $29. Purchase this book: Bookshop • Amazon Fiction in the Age of Amazon is the symbolic provision of more—above all, of more various and interesting “life experience” than can be had by any mortal being, let alone one constrained by the demands of work and family.
Verso
The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions The relationship between utopia and science fiction, in the age of globalization. In an age of globalization characterized by the dizzying technologies of the First World, and the social disintegration of the Third, is the concept of utopia still meaningful?
Bezos as Novelist
The first thing that needs to be noted about the collected works of MacKenzie Bezos, novelist, currently consisting of two titles, is how impressive they are. Will either survive the great winnowing that gives us our standard literary histories? Surely not. Precious few novels do. Neither even managed, in its initial moment of publication, to achieve the more transitory status of buzzy must-read.
Verso
Becoming Abolitionists Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom -1 0 Hardback Hardback 320 pages / / 9781839766671 Not in stock Where to buy —Powell’s Ebook Ebook / 9781839766688 Not available Where to buy —Apple iBooks How I became an abolitionist: a memoir of Black Lives Matter In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing uprising, police abolition became a central demand for the black lives matter movement.
Verso
Everything and Less The Novel in the Age of Amazon -1 0 Hardback Hardback with free ebook $29.95$17.9740% off 336 pages / October 2021 / 9781839763854 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.
Verso
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney Foreword by Angela Y. Davis -1 0 Paperback Paperback with free ebook $26.95$18.8630% off 416 pages / November 2018 / 9781788731188 An exemplary work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an ambitious masterwork of political economy, detailing the impact of slavery and colonialism on the history of international capitalism.
[Readings] The Mothership, By Mark McGurl
From Everything and Less, which will be published next month by Verso. A version of this essay appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of American Literary History. There is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover erotica as the quintessential Amazonian literature. It depends what aspect of Amazon one decides to put at the center of one’s inquiry.
Verso
The Anthropocene Unconscious Climate Catastrophe Culture -1 0 Hardback Hardback with free ebook $19.95$11.9740% off 176 pages / November 2021 / 9781839760471 How climate anxiety permeates our culture Today’s movies, television, and novels are pregnant with catastrophe, with extreme weather and rising waters, with environmental wildness and climate weirdness.
Feeling like the Internet
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on literary life have not been purely negative.
Verso
From New Left to New Labour This trenchant account of the last twenty-five years of the British Labour Party argues that Tony Blair's modernizing tendency was profoundly mistaken in asserting that the only alternative to traditional social democracy and narrow parliamentarianism was an acceptance of neo-liberalism.
The Novel’s Forking Path
Reading Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, it suddenly occurred to me why his 2005 novel Remainder is so good. It’s not the reason Zadie Smith gave in the New York Review of Books, however important that essay has been to winning McCarthy the readership he deserves. Those who agreed with Smith’s judgment of McCarthy’s earlier novel will probably like his new one, which sets itself the task of thinking about the present as directly as a novel could.
Verso
Automation and the Future of Work Silicon Valley titans, politicians, techno-futurists and social critics have united in arguing that we are living on the cusp of an era of rapid technological automation, heralding the end of work as we know it. But does the much-discussed “rise of the robots” really explain the jobs crisis that awaits us on the other side of the coronavirus?
Verso
Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden exposes the forgotten history of Joe Biden, one of the United States’ longest-serving politicians, and one of its least scrutinized. Over nearly fifty years in politics, the man called “Middle-Class Joe” served as a key architect of the Democratic Party’s rightward turn, ushering in the end of the liberal New Deal order and enabling the political takeover of the radical right.
Philip Roth’s Modest Phase
In the 1950s, when Philip Roth came of age and first began to publish, it was the fate of the writer to have to consider the fate of the individual, who was fated to do battle above all with institutions. Everywhere one looked they appeared to be looming over him — whether in the form of the welfare state, or various arms of the military that were still absorbing so many men into their ranks, or newly swelling corporate bureaucracies.
Verso
Alt-America The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump -1 0 1 Paperback Paperback with free ebook $16.95$11.8630% off 464 pages / November 2018 / 9781786634467 Hardback Hardback with free ebook $29.95$11.9860% off 464 pages / October 2017 / 9781786634238 The story of the remarkable resurgence of right-wing extremists in the United States Just as Donald Trump’s victorious campaign for the US presidency shocked liberal Americans, the seemingly sudden national prominence of white...
The Bingewatch: We're All Fired
Liberal grief in the wake of Trump’s election has occasioned binges galore: binge-drinking, binge-eating, binge-weed-smoking (marijuana’s legalization being the only positive juridical event of 2016), and not least, binge-watching.
Verso
Catching History: Vigils, Riots and the Right to Protest Connections between patriarchy, policing, and the failures of representational politics were brought into sharp focus last weekend by police violence at the vigil for Sarah Everard. Reading List Activism and Resistance Key titles on activism and global resistance, from movements for Black liberation and climate justice to labor organizing and anti-colonial struggles.
Feeling Like the Internet | Public Books
What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery ... What has the advent of the internet meant for the novel? Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at the center of culture?
On How to Take a Swing: "Good Prose" by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd
I AM SITTING on the stage at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. It’s the first stop of my tour for a novel (my novel!) that hit the shelves this morning. Next to me is Dennis Lehane — the Dennis Lehane — author of Mystic River, Shutter Island, and Gone, Baby, Gone. He has generously flown across the country to appear here with me, having chosen Visitation Street for his imprint at HarperCollins.
Verso
Capitalism in the Web of Life Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital -1 0 1 Paperback Paperback with free ebook $29.95$20.9630% off 336 pages / August 2015 / 9781781689028 Hardback Hardback with free ebook $95.00$76.0020% off 336 pages / November 2015 / 9781781689011 “Moore’s radical and rigorous work is, and richly deserves to be, agenda-setting.” – China Miéville Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W.
Get a Real Degree
The world of letters: does such a thing still exist? Even within the seemingly homogeneous sphere of the university English department, a schism has opened up between literary scholarship and creative writing: disciplines which differ in their points of reference (Samuel Richardson v. Jhumpa Lahiri), the graduate degrees they award (Doctor of Philosophy v. Master of Fine Arts) and their perceived objects of study (‘literature’ v. ‘fiction’).
The Zombie Renaissance
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Quirk Books, 2009. Max Brooks. The Zombie Survival Guide. Three Rivers Press, 2003. Max Brooks. World War Z. Three Rivers, 2007 Critics have been worrying about the death of the novel for decades, and the publication of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is unlikely to change that.
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