How to read a big book : the critical reception of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites in the context of contemporary trade book marketing

This particular essay looks at the mechanisms of trade book publishing, which, in the internet age, has sought increasingly to co-opt the sphere of judgement so as to ensure a benign cloud of positivity around priority titles. These are the so-called Big Books. To demonstrate the extent of the well-resourced PR departments of multinational publishers, Critic Watch tracked online the process of promoting Hannah kent's Burial Rites, a debut by a young novelist from Adelaide that secured a large advance.