![]() ![]() “He could be accused of tone policing,” added another. Miller comes from a generation that prizes “civility,” one employee noted. The executives expressed interest in the activists’ suggestions, but they also wanted to discuss the tone of the online discourse. The book’s editor, Amy Einhorn, was mostly silent. ![]() ![]() On the publisher’s side, Miller and Don Weisberg, then the president of Macmillan, did most of the talking. But I don’t think that was ever really on the table.” I wouldn’t eat the sandwiches. “He seemed to think, We will listen,” one employee said, “and then they will not be as heated in their rhetoric against the author. Miller had agreed to meet with them because he wanted to understand their perspective and hoped to quiet the negative attention the book was getting. They pressed the company to open an imprint for Latinx writers and to provide those writers with the same level of support and publicity Cummins had received. In their detailed presentation, the activists urged Macmillan to hire more Latinx editors and to start an apprenticeship program to attract new talent. The group had requested the meeting at Flatiron because it hoped the company might listen to some of its proposals. Gurba belonged to a network of Latinx writers, DignidadLiteraria, that had formed in the wake of American Dirt’s release to address what its members saw as systemic racism in the publishing industry. “We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor.” “Based on specific threats to booksellers and the author, we believe there exists real peril to their safety,” wrote Bob Miller, the president of Flatiron, the Macmillan imprint that had published the book. The week after the novel’s release, the tour was canceled. There was a plan to protest Cummins’s cross-country book tour. The early praise gave way to a flood of criticism: Thousands of articles and tweets took issue with the author’s identity, the book itself, and, crucially, a massive marketing push that was viewed as tasteless and misleading. In an essay for Tropics of Meta, an academic blog, she described it as shallow and full of harmful stereotypes and accused the author, Jeanine Cummins, a white woman, of writing “trauma porn that wears a social justice fig leaf.” Many agreed. The novelist Don Winslow called it “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.” Oprah, who picked it for her book club, wrote, “This story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant.” Gurba, who is Mexican American, saw it differently. Prominent readers had praised it in terms worthy of a Nobel Prize. In the months leading up to American Dirt’s publication, Macmillan had positioned the page-turner - about a mother and son escaping cartel violence in Mexico - as a definitive chronicle of the migrant experience. “I wouldn’t eat the sandwiches,” recalled Myriam Gurba, one of the activists. A representative of Oprah Winfrey’s listened in on the phone, and a platter of sandwiches sat on the table. Facing them was a collection of white editors and executives from Macmillan, the publishing house that had recently put out American Dirt, the most controversial book of the year, or maybe the century. Four Latinx writers and activists sat on one side of a long conference table. On a mild Monday this past February, a tense meeting unfolded in a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan.
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