Abstract
In the 1980s, anxiety about the extensive and ongoing conglomeration of the publishing industry led to the emergence of a movement of nonprofit publishers. It included counter-culture figures like Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press’s Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive’s John O’Brien; and refugees from conglomeration like Fiona McCrae and André Schiffrin. Non-profits often defined themselves by their support for literariness, and which they depicted as under threat from commercial houses, which helped them gain support from private foundations, philanthropists, and government agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts. We discovered that these two different ways of structuring publishers’ finances—conglomerate and nonprofit—created a split within literature, yielding two distinct modes of American writing after 1980. This essay characterizes the two modes, explains how the split between them happened, and illustrates the significance of this shift for the rise of multiculturalism. We pay particularly close attention to the careers of Percival Everett and Karen Tei Yamashita.
Highlights
From Port Townsend, Washington, you can watch the Puget Sound meet the Salish Sea: the small water turns west toward the open ocean
In Frenzy, authors navigate between the literariness of embodiment and allegories of conglomeration; in Erasure, the Scylla and Charybdis are the expectations placed on writers of color in a time of multiculturalism to represent their race
We look forward to publishing this yet-to-be-written re-envisioning of the city of dreams.”[84]. Such a book would neutralize Yamashita’s eccentric geographical predilections and situate her securely among multiculturalism
Summary
From Port Townsend, Washington, you can watch the Puget Sound meet the Salish Sea: the small water turns west toward the open ocean. Walker established “a minimal Board of Directors” — a requirement for nonprofits — with two members: Raymond Carver, who, was widely considered the country’s best short story writer; and Jonathan Galassi, a wellrespected editor at Random House who went on to become the president of FSG.[49] Graywolf won Mellon and Wallace grants. It included countercultural figures like Coffee House’s Allan Kornblum and Milkweed’s Emilie Buchwald, who got their start with boutique letterpresses; political and aesthetic activists like Arte Público’s Nicolás Kanellos, Feminist Press’s Florence Howe, and Dalkey Archive’s John O’Brien; and expatriates from conglomeration like McCrae and André Schiffrin (who had, started his own nonprofit, The New Press) Such figures pooled their resources for the benefit of all. What did it look like when the nonprofits translated the cant from their grant applications into published literature? What did it mean to be literary and diverse?
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