"The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024)

Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>

I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out).

I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest.

I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view.

There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.