Can The Nobel Prize Save Publishing From Itself?

For the second time in a decade, the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature is a challenging, self-obsessed singer-songwriter from the Midwest. Congratulations to Bon Iver!

Apologies, we’re getting reports that the winner is not Bon Iver, but rather the South Korean novelist Han Kang. We retract our congratulations to Bon Iver and extend them to Han Kang, who on Thursday was awarded the Nobel for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.” This is both an accurate descriptor of her subtle, unsettling work and one that could have easily come from ChatGPT. (There’s no reason to believe that the Swedish Academy employed A.I. to honor Han. Their blurbs have always been cold and aloof—that’s just how Scandinavians talk.)

The fact that the Academy has alighted on a deserving, interesting winner of the prize continues to be strange and miraculous, even if the twenty-first century has had far more hits than misses, many more recipients in the Doris Lessing zone—i.e., timeless—rather than the Rudyard Kipling zone—i.e., timeful (pejorative). After the prize’s annus horribilis (the prize was not awarded in 2018 due to intertwined gambling and sexual assault scandals that led to a shake-up and, ultimately, a rebrand), the Nobel has rebounded, and Han’s selection reflects some clear trends that have made themselves felt in subsequent years.

The first Asian laureate since the the Chinese novelist Mo Yan’s controversial selection in 2012, Han reflects the Academy’s growing attention to representation. The Nobel Prize: It’s no longer just for Scandinavians reflecting dolefully on their lives while gazing at their reflections in fjords, or French novelists reminiscing about their mistress cheating on them with their other mistresses. At the same time, the decision also reflects the prize’s larger turn toward seriousness and away from celebrity. Han is, by the prize’s recent standards, a star. But she is not a star on the level of 2017 laureate Kazuo Ishiguro (awarded for his “striking novels about robots sort of feeling sad”) or, for that matter, 2016 laureate Bob Dylan (honored for “shooting his shot with Alicia Keys and also that 14-minute song about the movie Titanic where the accordion is way too loud in the mix”).

The publishing context for Han is not as interesting as the way her work challenges narratives about Korea’s present and recent past—and particularly how it reckons with state violence, a theme that is depressingly resonant in this moment. Still, it’s the only way for us to do the crucial work all serious industry analysts need to do: publish a Nobel write-up that also makes numerous references to the Hawk Tuah girl. The award will undoubtedly cement Han’s status as a global literary star. It will also mean that the publishing world will, for a fleeting moment, be focused on more than one book.

It’s difficult to believe now, but once upon a time—as recently as, like, 10 years ago—there used to be more than one book. Asking what it was like before there was one book is like asking what it was like when union density was high, or when you didn’t constantly receive push notifications from major media organizations about the Hawk Tuah girl signing with UTA. What was it like? All we have are our dim, corroded memories, and those aren’t doing us very much good because of all the Hawk Tuah girl push notifications. The lost world of more than one book feels hard to conjure.

Technically, yes, there is more than one book. Surely more books have been published this year than ever before in history: challenging, eight-hundred-page novels about Silesian organic farming practices that refrain from using the letter k, romance novels about hunky podcasters falling for their shy but technically brilliant podcast producers, academic studies of academic studies, self-published accounts by retirees that reflect on their sacrifices and struggles as veterans (of the Cola wars).

But also … there is really just one book. (Sometimes, there are, in fact, no books. Right now, and for the conceivable future, however, that book is Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.) But it’s very possible that if what we read is increasingly just Elon Musk tweeting “Interesting” and “[thinking face emoji]” several dozen times a day about screenshots of Eugenics for Dummies, there will just be no books. One doesn’t have to be a scold to know that sustained interest in long, challenging books isn’t exactly being cultivated by our moron overlords.

There is only one book and very little coverage of books (except the one book). Criticism has sadly fallen so far that these days book coverage is only really a stepping stone to bigger things—like, say, writing columns about the two most dangerous threats to America: trans teenagers and the absence of columns about the dangerous threat of trans teenagers. In any case, you can’t find any of the other books because there’s only one place to buy books—and that place has been so overrun by A.I. slop that every search, no matter how specific, leads to thousands and thousands of works of A.I.-generated slop. (Case in point: The top three Amazon results for a recent search for James Joyce’s romantasy novel Ulysses: (1) Who Is Hawk Tuah Girl? (2) H Is for Hawk Tuah (3) Melania, by Hawk Tuah.)

Observers of American publishing (which is to say: freaks and sickos) have recently started paying closer attention to the rise of conglomeration and consolidation in the industry. (Even though there is only one book, there are still books about the lack of books—this is, in fact, a major growth area.) This process, which began one brisk fall day when Simon’s hat fell into a puddle and Schuster rescued it before it got completely soaked, has had many seemingly contradictory effects, but one inevitable outcome is the blockbusterization of literature—very much including the blockbusterization of decidedly nonblockbuster literature.

We’ll leave it to the literary critics to determine the manifestation of these trends within the books themselves (as you read this, an English Ph.D. student in a poorly lit carrel is examining their spreadsheets to determine how many more explosions there are in contemporary Dutch fiction as compared to the relatively nonexplosive days of Willem Bilderdijk). But as in film, painting, and the increasingly rapacious miming sector (miming trade magazines are full of justified concerns about the death of the miming midlist), art that might be withholding, challenging, or decidedly non-market-oriented ends up pushed and promoted like it’s Chicken Soup for the Hawk Tuah Soul.

Art that might be withholding, challenging, or decidedly non-market-oriented is not, to be clear, something that executives at big publishing houses are spending very much of their time thinking about. What they’re thinking about is whether they should continue to sign up debut authors with a Threads following under five figures, and if it’s possible to get A.I. to just transcribe some TikToks rather than actually hiring a ghostwriter to write TikTokers’ books for them.

And yet, from time to time good stuff does sneak through. Most of the time what happens to this good stuff is what happens to the vast majority of books—be they Central European farming novels with Oulipian characteristics or wish-fulfillment romance fiction about the SmartLess guys written by audio engineers who never seem to get the attention they just know they deserve—nothing. But contra the wishes of CEOs and shareholders, even in the often stultifying conglomerate age readers have displayed a stubborn and annoying tendency to actually want to read surprising, interesting stuff. Which is tricky for big publishers, because their bread and butter is increasingly … not that.

Before @krasznahorguy1954 SWATs our homes, before the Antonio Moresco fan club kidnaps our families, before we receive a cease and desist order from the Foundation for the Understanding of Central Kosovar Innovations in Naturalistic Genre Techniques, or FUCKINGT, we’re well aware that it’s the small presses and independent presses and microscopic presses and exploited translators and rain-lashed literary scouts that are doing the all-important work of bringing exciting writing to Anglo-American audiences. But (a) Han Kang is published in the United States by Penguin Random House, and (b) you guys (and let’s be real, it’s always guys) always go on Reddit and get extremely riled up, so what can we do? The next time a Dalkey Archive writer wins the prize you can pummel us with your out-of-print copies of Robbe-Grillet. (Right now one of you is about to post a comment along the lines of “Ugh did you see that they went with Robbe-Grillet? Total NPC shit.” Have some dignity!)

Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated by the great Deborah Smith, was published in 2015 in the U.K. by Portobello Books, an independent publisher, and in 2016 in the U.S. by Penguin Random House. The Vegetarian was followed by Human Acts, The White Book, and Greek Lessons. Not long after its publication, The Vegetarian won the Man Booker International Prize, which is increasingly serving as a kind of feeder prize for the Nobel. At 53 years old, Han is a relatively young Nobel winner by recent standards, though quinquagenarian—yes, that’s the actual term, or at least that’s what the A.I. supercomputer that now controls the internet tells us—laureates are hardly unheard of: Orhan Pamuk and Herta Müller both won Nobels in their early fifties, and Rudyard Kipling was awarded it at just 41 (for “excellence in making us all feel a lot better about all that stuff we’re doing over there, and actually, when you think about it, it’s really amazing how noble and decent we are—when you really think about it”).

In any case, Han’s Nobel should be seen not just as a celebration of a global star who has emerged in the past decade but as an extension of the mission of this iteration of the prize. Since its reemergence in 2019, the Swedish Academy has done its best to act as a redoubt for capital-g Global, capital-l Literature. When we started writing our little jokes about the Nobel Prize in literature nearly a decade ago, there was a lot to make fun of. For one thing, Philip Roth was still alive. But for another, the Nobel seemed to reflect—and often exacerbate—an existential crisis in publishing. Sensing growing irrelevance, that prize staggered randomly (and, if the reporting is to be believed, drunkenly) between relative unknowns and global superstars and genres, awarding oral histories of the chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union one year (Svetlana Alexievich, 2015) and songs about fucking cars and the joys of wiggling the next (Bob Dylan, 2016).

This Nobel Prize is not like that one. Yes, it has been controversial: Look no further than Peter Handke, who took a short break from ruminations on Hey, Slobodan Milošević did a lot of good things when you stop and think about it, to accept the prize in 2019. But the laureates that have been awarded since its return in 2019—Olga Tokaruczuk, Handke, Louise Glück, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Annie Ernaux, Jon Fosse, and now Han—broadly reflect a coherent and diverse vision of literature. In fact they constitute a kind of defense of literature in an era when it is constantly sullied and devalued. The Swedish Academy has cast itself as an island of seriousness in a swirling ocean of garbage and filth.

Making fun of the Nobel Prize in literature is, and will always be, fun to do: It is incredibly funny that a group of stuffy academics who live in a fake country that has only produced one worthy piece of art (ABBA Gold) get to give a prize for being the best at doing literature. But this iteration of the Swedish Academy does sometimes make it hard, in large part because it is doing a kind of service: highlighting meaningful, resonant work from across the world in an era when … that just doesn’t happen very often.

If The Vegetarian hadn’t been a hit with readers, and if it hadn’t won the International Booker, it’s very possible that Hogarth, the Bloomsbury-invoking imprint of Penguin Random House that publishes her books in the U.S., might not have continued putting out her fiction. But everything worked, and the audience was there, and in addition to the three books that followed The Vegetarian, there is another novel (and now, inevitably, more) on the way. (In the U.K., Han is now published by an imprint of … Penguin Random House.) This chain of events is very clearly a good thing for readers of Han’s fiction, and for readers generally.

But because there is only one book, it’s hard to see Han’s success as generalizable. There aren’t enough Man Booker International Prizes and Nobel Prizes to compensate for the blockbusterization of the publishing industry (especially when those prizes are awarded to the same writers), which means, in practice, that the field of interesting, dynamic writers with real visibility and access (potential or real) to a serious readership is continuing to narrow—even if very happy accidents continue to happen. Indeed, Han’s relatively young age obscures the fact that the Nobel Prize is heading into yet another uncertain period. On the one hand, the era of the global literary star is over. Not long ago, the Nobel would go to a gargantuan star every few years—Toni Morrison, Gabriel García Márquez, Gunter Grass, things of that nature. There are a few of those types of writers left—and if they are going to award Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon or Joyce Carol Oates (for her tweets), they better do it soon—but their era is over. We will not see its like again.

The Nobel Prize, unlike any other institution in the world, compels readers and publishers to briefly pay attention to—more often than not—deserving writing they often haven’t heard of before, for at least a week or two and sometimes longer. Unlike the three most recent recipients (Fosse, Ernaux, Gurnah), Han was already somewhat of a star, so her profile will grow rather than explode. The problem is that we no longer have an ecosystem that can support many Hans, or Ernauxs, at once. The publishing industry is not currently constructed to cultivate or promote authors who are doing the kind of work the Swedish Academy seemingly wants to highlight.

There is, after all, only one book at a time. Right now it’s by Han Kang.