'This chapter is a note on the how and the why of my method in dialogue with existing scholarship on Carey. It shows that conceptualising Carey in the context of global literature helps us to appreciate, not only his larger body of work for its complex representation of concurrent cultural economics, but also the ways that the process of production in the publishing industry coalesces with the mechanics of diffusion and the regimes of reception. Here, I broach my central questions: how and, to what extent, can we think of Carey’s fiction and his writerly persona as cultural objects circulating within the global literary marketplace? How does his fiction refract the market forces that manufacture his books and his celebrity? What is the relationship between Carey’s stories and the literary marketplace, between the making of his books and the reading of them? And what possibilities of resistance against the vagaries of neoliberal publishing remain for Carey as an avowedly postcolonial writer? ' (Publication abstract)