Making Literature Now

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

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A previous version of McSweeney’s and the School of Life was published in Contemporary Literature 53:4 (2012): 646–80. © 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced by the permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

A previous version of How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love was published in American Literary History 25:3 (2013): 607–24. © 2013 by Oxford University Press and reproduced by its permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hungerford, Amy, author.

Title: Making literature now / Amy Hungerford.

Other titles: Post 45.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2016. | Series: Post 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2015050245| ISBN 9780804795128 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780804799409 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Publishers and publishing—United States. | Book industries and trade—United States. | Literature—Appreciation—United States. | Books and reading—United States. | McSweeney’s (Firm)

Classification: LCCZ471 .H89 2016 | DDC070.5—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015050245

ISBN 9-780-8047-9942-3 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion

Making Literature Now

Amy Hungerford

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

Advance Praise for Making Literature Now

"Making Literature Now is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the way the conditions of cultural creation are changing in the new economy. In a granular and highly accessible manner, Hungerford takes us into sites where the work of making, disseminating, and reading contemporary fiction actually takes place, introducing us to the kinds of people who make it possible. An inventive blend of theory and criticism with profile and reportage, Making Literature Now is enriched by its range of angles and approaches. This is a book with its finger on the pulse of the contemporary literary scene."

William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education and Excellent Sheep

"Amy Hungerford’s Making Literature Now is bold and brilliant. At once coolly analytical and ardently engaged, Hungerford reads and interprets with rigor, precision, and moral passion. Bracing, important, revelatory work."

Priscilla Gilman, author of The Anti-Romantic Child

"Beneath the pleasure of discovering an unknown new book is the vertiginous sense of an entire unknown literature lying beneath the handful of titles that have come to define contemporary writing. Amy Hungerford exposes the subterranean networks that channel books to acclaim or oblivion in order to rescue an alternative present. Written with Hungerford’s characteristic compassion and rigor, Making Literature Now illuminates what it means to write—and to read—in the millennium."

Michael Clune, author of Gamelife and White Out

"Piercing through the oppressive roar of our online culture, Making Literature Now provides an invaluable definition of what is, and often what is not, twenty-first-century literature. In identifying emerging paradigms through the literary stars who create them, Amy Hungerford blazes a new trail, going where most scholars dare not tread."

Robert Weil, Editor-in-Chief, Liveright Publishers

"It’s rare for literary criticism to bring news. But Making Literature Now is that decisive book that tells you things you want to know about the circumstances and conditions of writing today, even while it guides you through theoretical issues and conflicts with a friendly and ingenious intelligence. Hungerford’s brilliant portraits of editors and writers, behind-the-scenes ethnography, and pointed inquiries make this the book from which future literary histories will be written."

Mark Greif, author of The Age of the Crisis of Man

"What Bruno Latour once achieved for laboratory life, Amy Hungerford brilliantly achieves for the life of literature, rediscovering a wealth of potential interest in people and things most often forgotten on the way to the grand concept. By turns deeply empathetic and thrillingly severe, Making Literature Now points the way forward to future study in this vein even as it is the satisfyingly finished statement of a singular critical sensibility."

Mark McGurl, author of The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

An adroit, illuminating study of literature today—Hungerford is an eloquent, curious, and passionate cartographer of the secret histories of what we read—or don’t—and the myriad ways in which the virtual world has created new landscapes for the imaginative work of private reading and public intellectual history.

Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History and The Ada Poems

Hungerford’s findings about the arbitrariness of how literary prestige is made in our moment are as fascinating as they are troubling. For as she ponders the impact that publishing in certain venues can have on writers’ careers, Hungerford also comes to dwell on the vagaries of gender and fiction. Her provocative concluding chapter, on writing, reading, and misogyny, then offers a purposeful refusal to read David Foster Wallace.

Juliana Spahr, author of That Winter the Wolf Came

"Making Literature Now turns received ideas about publishing on their heads. As persuasive, intelligent, and irreverent as the innovators it examines (with Eli Horowitz and Richard Nash leading the way), the book is an eye-opening pleasure for anyone who cares about literature—makers, disseminators, and readers alike."

Emily Barton, author of The Book of Esther, Brookland, and The Testament of Yves Gundron

Loren Glass and Kate Marshall, Editors

Post•45 Group, Editorial Committee

For my sister, Holly Frances Hungerford

1965–2011

who lives

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Writing from the Rabbit Hole

1. Making Literature Now

2. McSweeney’s and the School of Life

3. Reading Novels in the Net

4. GPS Historicism

5. How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love

6. On Not Reading DFW

Afterword: Present-Tense Archive

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

A scholar of contemporary literature is privileged to be able to talk in real time to writers and others in the business of making literature. In this project I embraced that privilege and turned my research to the archive of the unfolding present. In that open-air library I met many makers and thinkers who changed me and whose company made research a joy.

I am grateful first and foremost to Jordan Bass at McSweeney’s for opening the door for my initial research trip to the press’s offices in San Francisco. During that visit many members of the staff talked with me about their work and their aspirations and I enjoyed a brief conversation with Dave Eggers, who had given his permission for the visit. Those interviews became the kernel of my thinking in the book; it would be a lesser thing without that core of urgent, humane conversation early in the project. Radiating out from the McSweeney’s staff are the writers, literary entrepreneurs, and editors with whom I spoke during the development of this book. I am deeply indebted to Richard Nash for several long interviews about his work, and to Deb Olin Unferth, who taught me much, both in her writing and in conversation.

Russell Quinn, whom I met at McSweeney’s in 2010, continued to talk with me after he left the press. It was a privilege to get to know him and his art. Eli Horowitz, true to his vocation as an editor and creator, was generous with his time, energy, and conversation. He was willing to converse about his projects and mine over several years, always responsive and engaged when I reached out to him. Best of all, Eli always asked questions that made me see in an utterly new light some idea, sentence, or fact that had crept unexamined into my work. I am honored by the friendship he extended to me and to this project.

I am not sure that any of these people—all makers in their own right—will either like or agree with the analyses and conclusions of this book; the opinions and mistakes here are all mine. I venture to hope that we are committed to the same thing: to a capacious vision of what it means to make literature now.

The intellectual company found in my own institutional home—the university—sustained me as always. My friends and colleagues in the Post45 collective brilliantly dissected many parts of this book between 2009 and 2015. The thanks would have to start with J. D. Connor, Florence Dore, Mary Esteve, Loren Glass, Kate Marshall, Sean McCann, Deak Nabers, Debbie Nelson, and Michael Szalay, but there are so many others from our symposia—particularly Mark McGurl—whose comments left an imprint on this book. The work also benefited from the responses of audiences at Case Western Reserve, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Stanford, Tufts, UCLA, the University of Maryland, and the University of Michigan, as well as the editors, faculty, and graduate students at the Arizona Quarterly symposium in 2011 and the participants at Günter Leypoldt’s Acquired Taste conference at the Center for American Studies at the University of Heidelberg in June 2013.

My graduate students—especially the members of our dissertation working group—were kind and energetic intellectual companions while I was writing this book: special thanks to Tony Domestico, Merve Emre, Soren Forsberg, Chris Grobe, Len Gutkin, and Palmer Rampell. Jonathan Freedman was my intellectual sounding board on many summer runs in Vermont; those conversations were as pleasing and wild as the hills and bears. Lanny Hammer’s advice on ethnographic research and our gossipy talks about our work at the Kitchen Zinc bar never failed to recharge my thinking and my pleasure in the task.

Gordon Hutner, David James, and Andrzej Gąsiorek edited pieces that appeared in ALH and Contemporary Literature; I am grateful for their commitment to helping my work (and in Gordon’s case, so many others’ work) achieve its best form. And more, it is humbling to realize that seven people have read and commented on something resembling the full manuscript. Kathryn Lofton and Leslie Jamison read all I had at different points during the year before the manuscript went to the press for review. Their readings—personal, invested, sparking with intellectual wattage—had a profound impact on my conception of the book as a whole. My only regret is that Making Literature Now is not as brilliant as their different visions of it, visions they shared with me over summer cocktails and purple-rice sushi, respectively. The two readers for Stanford University Press—Mark Greif and another anonymous reader—gave me incisive advice to which I tried to live up. Mark, a gifted editor himself, suggested how to revise the structure of the chapters, which has made, I hope, for a much more shapely book. At Stanford University Press, Emily-Jane Cohen, supportive from the first, offered a level of attention that is rare these days, reading the manuscript from cover to cover and helping me retune my evolving prose style. Florence Dore and Loren Glass, the Post45 series editors, offered feedback and enthusiasm for the manuscript that helped push it into port. Stanford honored my wish to find two readers beyond the members of the Post45 Board (who were already familiar with my work) rather than the customary one. I think this was crucial to the book’s final growth.

Closest to home, my mother, Valerie Hungerford, housed me, fed me, and graciously ignored me during several key writing retreats at her house in New Hampshire over the last few years. Those stints of concentrated work were beyond price and I treasure the memory of them. My sister, Laura Bachmann, cheered me on, made well-timed quips when needed, and helped me decide what to put first when many things demanded my attention. My children, Clare and Cyrus, endured my preoccupation and grounded me always in the pleasures of love and play. My spouse, Peter Chemery, opened up the time for me to go away for those writing weekends, and gave me the mental space to continue when at home. He has been faithful to my vocation as a scholar and writer even when I have not. To borrow some words from a favorite John Barth story: it is he who best espouses me.

Introduction

Writing from the Rabbit Hole

In the back of the cruddy basement space of McSweeney’s offices at 849 Valencia Street in San Francisco, one could find, at the end of 2010, cardboard boxes spilling stacks of postcards. These were the business reply cards sent back by readers to begin their subscriptions to the press’s literary quarterly; they were stashed among the drafts, proofs, and correspondence of the press’s disorganized archive. Many were embellished with notes and doodles, and the earliest came wrapped in letters specifying the subscriber’s choice of bonus gifts on offer—T-shirts, drawings, special inscriptions—for those who were kind enough to buy the magazine. Those reply cards exuded personality, as if they were directed not to a press’s marketing operation but to a particular someone who elicited affirmation, banter, friendship. Of course this was the tone set by the press’s founder, Dave Eggers, in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Eggers had established that tone at the press from the start. In the early years, it would be hard to call McSweeney’s sales activities a marketing operation—it was just Eggers and a friend or two trying to sell enough subscriptions to keep going.

One story that could be told about what it takes to make literature now—and, more locally, about what those postcards mean—would center on a figure like Eggers. This book takes a different approach and, moreover, holds lightly to its choices about what to hold up out of the welter of contemporary writing and publishing in the effort to understand how literature is made now. In paired chapters, the book enters various portals to a story about the networks through which contemporary literature is made. The first two chapters focus directly on McSweeney’s and some writers they have published; the second two take up a handful of small-scale virtual media literary enterprises; the last two chapters consider writers who are successful in the large-scale literary trade press. These pairs have their own shapes and arguments, but also communicate materially with one another through points of intersection touching back to the McSweeney’s network. We might use an analogy from gaming, with an assist from Lewis Carroll, to describe how these chapters work together: each account of making serves as a rabbit hole into a broader network of makers, objects, and acts.

In alternate reality gaming, the rabbit hole is an invitation to enter the alternate world of the game. It might be a note chalked on a sidewalk, a sign on a certain telephone pole, a post or a web site or a tweet. Players follow a game’s rabbit holes into the alternate reality created by the game’s designers and, ultimately, by its players. Each rabbit hole sparks an action that pulls the player physically and mentally into a network of people, places, acts, things, consequences. Such games unfold differently depending upon which rabbit hole a player has chosen to follow, and thus what we refer to as the game is more like a network of linking and overlapping sets of plays. Like the reality to which they provide an alternative, such games blend the intentions of designers with the unpredictable choices of individual players and the contingencies of the material world through which they thread. The game and its outcomes are described by some complex equation encompassing all of these. Indeed, the alternate reality is not experienced as the same by each player, and fundamental differences grow from a player’s choice of rabbit hole.

The postcards in the McSweeney’s basement are themselves a rabbit hole. They pull us toward a larger social network, a network that requires not one person but dozens, hundreds. Some work centrally at the press, more have passed through it as interns. Hundreds have published in the quarterly—533 different writers appeared in the first 31 issues, to take one benchmark—and thousands of others read their work, mapping the social geography of McSweeney’s distribution around the world. And then there are the overlapping networks of writers, readers, and publishers that we might offhandedly call contemporary American publishing, and that share space in the culture with McSweeney’s. Those who publish in McSweeney’s may also publish elsewhere; those who work for the press come from and go on to other jobs. For every McSweeney’s book shares a shelf at the bookstore—or a page on the web, or a table in a home or classroom—with other books and objects, and each has a story to explain its presence there. Their surfaces touch, their icons scroll, they accumulate marginalia, fingerprints, or dust, and the browsing hand continually chooses. What do their material connections tell us about our shared culture? And what follows from the browser’s choices?

Across the room from the piled boxes in the 849 Valencia Street basement, just above a grouping of ancient couches, a mural brightened the mess when I visited there in 2010. About five feet square, in reds, browns, and yellows and high proletarian style, the mural showed workers bending in the fields, harvesting books that twined up on stalks from the furrows. In the sky above them a shining, smiling figure presided, dressed in Chairman Mao’s jacket. One might at first mistake that man for Dave Eggers, as I did when I first laid eyes on it. But no: this is Eli Horowitz.

Who? My point, exactly. This book tells the stories of how unknown participants, workers who are largely invisible to the public—including readers, writers, editors, book distributors, and scholars—collaborate (sometimes unwittingly) to create literary worlds, including the world glimpsed in those stacks of subscription cards and affectionately satirized in the basement mural. To consider the penumbra of actors surrounding a figure such as Eggers is to question the very weight such public figures carry in literary culture, a weight that is often taken for granted by those who write about that culture. Understanding Eggers doesn’t allow us necessarily to understand why and how readers and writers connect, in material ways, with the press he founded. Precision matters: sometimes it is not an Eggers but a Horowitz who builds the road from writer to reader. This is a book, then, about literary work in its multifarious forms, about the institutions and relationships that organize and shape that work. And by work I don’t only mean works—novels or stories—but also work in the ordinary sense: the daily labor of those who read, write, review, teach, make, distribute, design, and sell books and other forms of writing that become classed under that baggy term, literature. They do so, or try to do so, for a living.

One branch of contemporary sociology has laid down a challenge that this book takes up by thinking about contemporary literature’s social worlds. It has been argued, over the last 15 years or so, that the field of sociology mistakenly assumes—as do most of us in common parlance—that something called the social always exists. The French sociologist Bruno Latour argued instead that social connections only deserve the name when they are acted upon, that the social only exists at all when its networks are activated, and what’s more, that social actors come in both human and nonhuman forms. Our connections to other people only constitute social organization when we, or nonhuman actors like books, apps, or delivery truck routes, act to change or shape the arrangements in which we live—be they material, cultural, environmental, geographic, psychic, intellectual.

Latour’s claim is provocative for the scholar contemplating a research project: it makes the standard and the object of sociological study seem virtually unreachable by the ordinary means of scholarly inquiry, especially if the subject of study is some aspect of the past. The grain of research that flows logically from this understanding of the social is incredibly fine and of a qualitative sort that defies statistical aggregation, let alone the slow habits of close reading; a grain that can never be fully represented even by the most obsessive archival practices. The method calls to mind versions of study that are daunting and tedious and threaten to devolve into what one colleague called a heap of facts: being there to see the conversations that make things happen in whatever field of endeavor we want to understand; raking the archives not for recollection or record but for the actual trace of a social act as it unfolded, and not just one social act