JONATHAN Baumbach was desperate. He was a young novelist. It was the 1970s. He had published his first two novels with major presses, Random House and Harper & Row; he was represented by a leading agent, Candida Donadio; he had a teaching position at Brooklyn College in New York; and yet his new novel had been rejected thirty-two times and remained without a home. It was, he thought, his best, but it was experimental, with limited commercial prospects. Still, he found solidarity with other writers he admired, including Steve Katz, Mark Jay Mirsky, Ronald Sukenick, and Peter Spielberg. Like Baumbach, they had experimental inclinations. Also like Baumbach, many of them had published with mainstream presses, but they saw something changing. Conglomerates were buying previously independent publishers such as Bantam Books,…
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Poets & Writers (Digital) - 1 Issue, November/December 2024