This chapter assesses Kerouac’s literary career from the perspective of the profession of authorship. Despite his bohemian reputation, Kerouac was a diligent professional writer who engaged publishers directly and via literary agents in order to actively manage his professional career. Kerouac’s goal was to convince publishers and thus the reading public of the significance of his signature artistic style, which he called “Spontaneous Prose.” Viking Press was not interested in his Spontaneous Prose books as viable sellers, and his income and reputation declined in proportion with his insistence on producing books in this style. Despite the belief held by many Kerouac fans today that he was a literary saint who disavowed money and materialism, in fact he both wanted to make money and earn literary respect based on his artistic merits. He was not a commercial writer per se, since he sacrificed publication for the integrity of his art, but he did want the publishing industry to see the inherent value in his Spontaneous Prose books.

Drawing on archival material, interviews with editors and collaborators, and available publication history, this essay will situate Wallace’s writing within the publishing environment of his lifetime. The essay will be structured in three sections. The first will survey the material contexts of Wallace’s published output, tracing how his work entered the literary marketplace as well as the changes in that marketplace during the consolidation of what has been called the “Conglomerate Era” of US publishing. The second will consider the ways in which the author integrated these changes into his own writing – from his anxieties about the threats to literary culture from television in the 1980s, his development of these fears in the spectacle of weaponized entertainment within Infinite Jest, to his sustained act of Information Age media archaeology in The Pale King in response to the corporate-dominated “Total Noise” of the twenty-first century. The final section will survey Wallace’s posthumous publications, considering the ways in which his legacy is continued and contested in publications across physical and digital media.

This chapter explores whether it is possible to talk meaningfully of an African brand of crime fiction. It seeks broad trends in localized examples but, in so doing, it privileges those texts that have resonated beyond national and indeed continental borders. Following a survey of the role played by the Parisian publishing industry in the global dissemination of African crime fiction, the focus turns inwards, examining how authors including Benin’s Florent Couao-Zotti and South Africa’s Margie Orford and Deon Meyer stage the continent’s social realities, typically in the wake of independence. Crucial here is the appropriation of the city. On the other hand, authors including Mali’s Aïda Mady Diallo and Moussa Konaté and Ghana’s Kwei Quartey and Nii Ayikwei Parkes use their work to subvert the literary myths of rural Africa. The chapter argues that Sub-Saharan African crime fiction has an important anthropological function, adapting the genre’s urban DNA in order to map the tensions between the traditions of rural Africa and life in its modern cities.

Histories of dissolving high/low culture divides inform Katalin Orbán’s discussion of contemporary graphic fiction, as she posits the critical and popular emergence of long-form, verbal-visual works that push narrative conventions in new directions, such as spatial-temporal experiments (e.g., by Chris Ware and Richard McGuire), the use of visual metaphors and other conventionally linguistic literary devices, and genre blurring distinctive to the drawn medium.

This chapter engages the history of key literary prizes that have been awarded to black and Asian writers. What is the impact of awards which prize otherness, celebrate diversity, and demand BAME writers to engage a fixed range of topics, arguably in a limited number of forms? While literary awards create visibility, stimulate sales, and direct critical attention to selected writers and texts, the trade-off is the required negotiation of thematic, formal, and identitarian templates confronting potential recipients.

The introduction begins by highlighting the novelist Tao Lin's attempt to sell shares in an unwritten novel - an especially striking manifestation of the market logics examined throughout the book. The introduction then maps the historical and conceptual ground of the project. Successive sections trace how the interlocking developments of neoliberalism and financialization since the 1970s have extended what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “pure market logic” to ever-widening domains of social life; how Fredric Jameson’s paradigm-defining theorizations of the contemporary nonetheless go too far in positing postmodernist culture as a straightforward expression of this logic; how the power of market forces in the present elicits a condition of ambivalence among contemporary writers that is neither simply critical nor “postcritical,” but combines the intense affective states of both positions; and, finally, how the publishing industry and book retail business have undergone their own neoliberal and financial revolutions over recent decades, with profound consequences for novelistic practice. The remaining section of the introduction summarizes the arguments of the book’s chapters and Coda.