The New York Review of Books Turns 50

New York Magazine sits down with its founding editor, Robert Silvers.

From the piece...

You didn’t have any notion this would become an institution in this way?
No. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I thought it was very possible that I would come back, and it was very kind of Jack to say my job would be held open. I asked Barbara Epstein that morning if she would join me as co-editor. She said yes. We met the next night with Lizzie in the darkened Harper’s offices. We looked through the books that had come in for review, and we thought of various people who might write on them. 

The first issue appeared dated February 1, 1963. It has been called the best first issue of a magazine ever published. Looking at these names glittering on the cover, it’s astonishing how many, from W. H. Auden to Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy to Norman Mailer to William Styron, John Berryman to Robert Lowell to Robert Penn Warren, and on and on, are still recognizable.
I remember Jason called his friend Wystan Auden. Lizzie called Fred Dupee—Lizzie and Barbara both. Lizzie called Mary McCarthy, and so did I. Barbara called Gore Vidal. I called Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, and Norman Mailer. In the next two days I talked with Jonathan Miller, who wrote on Updike, and then with Philip Rahv, and Dwight MacDonald, who wrote on Arthur Schlesinger.

What did you say?
I said, we’re starting a new book review, and would they write on the book I was sending? They had three weeks. There was no question of payment. No one asked about it. Sometimes they said, “I’d rather do another book.” They all just assumed a new book review was needed.

What's Next for the New York Times Book Review?

They have a new editor so what's coming?

From a piece on the Daily Beast...

Are you worried about the future of books?

No, because fundamentally people love stories and they want information, and a book, to my mind, is still one of the best ways to tell stories and deliver information and I don’t think it’s going anywhere. I think that’s part of human nature.

As a longtime fan of the Book Review, the one criticism I would offer is there are times, reading from Berlin or California, when it has seemed to me a little too focused on the tastes of people in Manhattan. To what extent are you looking to address a New York readership and to what extent are you looking to a national readership?

We’re a national newspaper now and that’s even more so with the Book Review, because we are the last freestanding book review section in the country, so I definitely consider our audience not only to be national but global. Just as we read The Guardian here at the Review, we have a readership in other countries. There are so many books that are conceived on a global way in the same way that’s happened in the film industry. We have an international audience. There are a lot of people who are interested in books in English who live all over the world, and we want to address them as well.

Literarily Drunk

Moby Ick's More Like It

A selection of 1-star reviews for Moby-Dick on Amazon.

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother Inspires Novel

NPR discusses the new book, Mary Coin.

From the piece...


I feared that Silver's novel might be "colorized," too, punching up its account of the meeting between Lange and Thompson and, in particular, sanctifying Thompson's maternal ordeal, to make the story appealing to women's book clubs across the land. But curiosity trumped cynicism, especially since Lange's photograph, even in this altered form, always commands attention. What I found is that, far from romanticizing the suffering of the Great Depression, Silver stares at it hard, square in the face, just as Lange must have done that March day in 1936 when, on assignment for the federal Farm Security Administration, she drove into the migrant workers camp, took six photos of Thompson and her children and then drove away.

Silver is an evocative, precise writer, and her story — really interlocking tales — takes readers deep into the callous realities of life during the Dirty '30s.

Happy 50th Birthday, New York Review of Books

Salon celebrates.

From the story...

It is, of course, a singularity, the unique product of a very particular moment in American literary culture and of a small group of skilled, visionary and very wired editors. The tale has often been told of how the publisher Jason Epstein, his wife, the editor Barbara Epstein, the critic Elizabeth Hardwick and her husband, Robert Lowell, convened in an apartment on West 67thStreet in the midst of an extended newspaper strike in New York, then in its second vexing week. The absence of the New York Times and its book review constituted a grievous problem for publishers, who felt they had nowhere to advertise their books or get them effectively reviewed; the very existence of the book review constituted a grievous problem for those four people, who viewed it with disdain. In his memoir “Book Business,” Epstein says, “Its reviews were ill-informed, bland, occasionally spiteful, usually slapdash.” Hardwick had recently written a brutal takedown in Harper’s, decrying “the lack of literary tone itself” and dismissing it as “a provincial journal.” So they seized the day: Lowell borrowed $4,000 to float the enterprise, and the brilliant young Harper’s editor Robert Silvers was hired on for what very well could have been a one-off job, if the new review could not have been made financially self-sustaining. The whole thing had the air of an Andy Hardy let’s-put-on-a-show exercise, except the cast of this movie all went to Columbia, Kenyon and the University of Chicago and came equipped with killer rolodexes and deadly serious intent. As the “To the Reader” note on page two puts it, “The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review, but the demand for one.”

Mission accomplished.

Lone Star Statements

The praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.

From the piece in The Morning News... 

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
“While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt.”

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
“When one contrasts Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five with this book, it’s like comparing an Olympic sprinter with an obese man running for the bus with a hot dog in one hand and a soda in the other.”

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
“It grieves me deeply that we Americans should take as our classic a book that is no more than a lengthy description of the doings of fops.”

The History of the Ballpoint Pen

Because you were dying to know, yes?

From a review in the Wall Street Journal...

Through much trial and error, and with the help of his early backer and business partner, Andor Goy (1896-1991), Bíró developed a working ballpoint pen. The two men signed a contract to produce and market the pen in 1938. Thus a simple but remarkable invention came into a world about to be convulsed by death and destruction. We see Bíró refining the pen and experimenting with recipes for the ink paste essential to his concept while fleeing dangers that seemed to chase him across Europe as war brewed and then broke out.

Bíró comes across as amazingly tolerant of, even oblivious to, the uncertainties and dangers that threatened his life and the fate of his invention. He was not totally naïve; he tried to safeguard his commercial interests. Nor were his successive entrepreneurial collaborators totally unscrupulous. At each stage, Bíró tried to strike the best deal he could, though his own shares dwindled steadily—and at one point he had to choose between keeping his remaining shares or selling them to help his family flee to Argentina. Understandably, he had no regrets about bartering to save lives. Yet Mr. Moldova rightly emphasizes the ultimate irony that "the inventor who conducted the thousands of experiments needed to perfect the ballpoint pen ended up without a penny of stock in the factory where they had taken place." Inventors, beware!

The Epidemic of Niceness in Online Book Culture

Is all this kumbaya in book culture a good thing? Or, not so much?

From a piece on Slate...

But let’s say you’re part of this web of writers, fiction-lovers, literary editors, and readers in the social-media world, and you’re assigned a review of Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures. What if you don’t like it? Or what if you like it, but not unreservedly? Are you willing to say so? Would you be willing to critique Straub’s novel after watching her life scroll out on social media over the last year—indeed, after likely being the recipient or admirer of some small word or act of kindness on Straub’s part?


To the uninitiated, this might seem immaterial, or like the kind of navel-gazing tabulation of credentials that can make the New York literary world insufferable. As a relatively recent arrival to New York, I can say that both are true. But it also matters, because the situation of someone like Straub epitomizes the mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online.

Marilyn's Memorabilia

On the 50th anniversary of her death, Marilyn collectors are feverish for paper ephemera, photos, books, and more. Check out a few items, here.

John Banville discusses Mariyln, here.


The New York Times discusses her, here.

Henry David Thoreau - Illustrated

The Short History of Book Reviewing's Slow Decline

The Awl puts a nail in the coffin of book reviewing.

From the piece...

"Who Killed the Literary Critic?" was the subject of a 2008 Salon conversation between critics Laura Miller and Louis Bayard. The trigger for the discussion: a book called The Death of the Critic which hypothesized that the lack of both public intellectuals and a rigorous academic community of inquiry had caused criticism to founder. Miller considered how the increase of “too many other entertainment options” takes away from reading time. Against this, both Miller and Bayard discuss the “fuck you” aspect of modernism's output as a factor that might drive readers to kindlier, more benevolent texts—novels and television shows that don’t wish to frighten audiences with their aggressive difficulty. “There are no critical movements evident today,” observed Miller. (And even if there were, they’re not all going to be online, or in one forum. Any real critical movement simply should not be confined to one community or some new means of communication.) Perhaps a large problem in the decline of good criticism is that readers no longer know how, or where, to find critics, and, more importantly, how to define what makes it Good.

The Importance of Dust Jackets

The Times Literary Supplement reviews G. Thomas Tanselle's Book-Jackets: Their history, forms, and use.

From the piece...

Dust jackets have worried the pundits since the 1920s. Book buyers are divided over whether to retain or discard them. Librarians, who always discarded, are rebuked for destroying book history. Book historians dispute whether the jacket is even part of the book. Bibliographers don’t know whether to describe jackets, or, if they do, what they should say about them. And second-hand booksellers rejoice in the confusion, some marking up prices furiously, others shaking their heads in wonder at this further proof of the idiocy, as they see it, of the “modern first” market. 

Another 100,000 Galleys

The Los Angeles Review of Books highlights how difficult it is to get self-published books reviewed by the media.

From the piece...

Editors, reviewers, and even many authors believe that if you self-publish, you’re branded a sinner of sorts. You wear a scarlet S-P, signifying that you can’t get published because your work is inferior. If you promote your own work on the Internet, you must sheepishly precede the phrase “self-promotion” with “shameless.” It’s difficult to quantify the extent of the stigma, but we all know that publishing your own work has been frowned upon by writers for decades. Recently, genre authors Amanda Hocking (who writes young adult vampire novels) and John Locke (pulp thrillers) have had so much success independently publishing and selling hundreds of thousands of their own books that you’d think the self-publishing wall would’ve been kicked down and lying in a crumbled mess by now. But the stigma attached to publishing, promoting, and selling your own written word persists. Most writers, like Susan Shapiro, who’s written for the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and has conventionally published eight books, including comic novels and nonfiction through St. Martin’s Press and Delacorte, remain convinced that it’s better to get a mainstream publisher. Shapiro, who’s helped hundreds of her students get published, recently told me she would consider self-publishing, but only “if everybody else turned me down.”

No one ever faulted Woody Allen, Orson Welles, Quentin Tarantino, or Charlie Chaplin for writing, directing, and producing their own movies. No one disrespects musicians for distributing their music without a major label behind them. And poets — think of Walt Whitman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and the authors of contemporary poetry chapbooks — have long been used to publishing their own work. Why then should independent publishing be regarded any differently? Especially when even established writers, in today’s traditional publication market, can have difficulty getting their publishers and agents behind a book? A slumping economy has pushed already-teetering bookstores into bankruptcy, further squeezed publishers’ profits, and reduced and in some cases eliminated book review space.

Gender Bias in Books Journalism Acute

A study by Vida shows a great majority of quality-press reviews are still by and about male writers.

From a piece in the Guardian...

Vida, an American organisation supporting women in the literary arts, has compiled statistics on the gender split in books coverage at publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker and the New York Times Book Review, each of which showed a substantial bias towards using male reviewers and covering male authors.

At the LRB last year 16% of reviewers were women (29 out of 184) and 26% of authors reviewed (58 out of 221); at the New York Review of Books 21% of 254 reviews were by women, 17 of 92 authors reviewed were female and 13% of 152 articles were by women. Of 1,163 reviews in the TLS in 2011, 30% were by women, and of 1,314 authors reviewed, 25% were women. Granta was the only publication to have more female contributors, at 53%, but much of this was down to its women-only feminism issue.

Where the Major Papers Stand on Book Reviewing

It's not all bad!

From a piece on Publisher's Weekly...

The Cleveland Plain-Dealer

The paper overhauled its coverage in 2009, and now book-related content opens broadsheets in Sunday’s Arts section. The book coverage includes six to seven stand-alone reviews, as well as a column from book editor Karen R. Long. There’s a “new in paperback” section, which also focuses on one title, and a themed capsule roundup.

The San Francisco Chronicle

A pullout Books section runs every Sunday featuring six to nine reviews of roughly 750 words each, along with one or two 250-word capsule reviews. In addition to the reviews, there’s a bestseller list; a 10-title recommendation list from local booksellers; a sample of notable first sentences in new releases; and a 100-word item from a famous local person about his/her favorite book.

Sh#t Book Reviewers Say

Remains of the Days

The New York Times explores books that explores the world of PBS's hit series Downtown Abbey.

From the article...

Until “Downton Abbey,” I never realized how many of my deepest desires involved ironing. True, it would also be nice to have a great deal of furtive sex with my social inferiors, preferably in crinolines. But at this point, I’d settle for a crisp newspaper.

I know I should feel guilty about my cravings for these things. But that’s the beauty of shows like “Downton Abbey” and its venerable ancestor “Upstairs, Downstairs”: the lives of the gentry are filled with so much intrigue, excruciating protocol and silent suffering that it would be churlish to resent their unimaginably comfortable existence.

And there’s another draw for Americans, particularly in an election year. We continue to labor under the delusion that we live in a class-free society — that social mobility is a birthright, not a remote possibility. If we’re not continually upgrading our circumstances, as Newt Gingrich reminds us, it’s our own damn fault. We are expected to be “Oprah”-ishly self-actuating and self-improving, and only sloth prevents us from achieving spiritual clarity and financial success. How perversely comforting, then, to turn our attention to a world where you will die where you are born and where the heroes are the rare overachievers who work their way up to butler from footman.

Literary Gender Bias at NPR

The Boston Phoenix examines it.

From the piece...

My own research has turned up even more damaging statistics. To test Weiner's hypothesis, I turned to another literary gatekeeper: public radio. NPR is one of the few mass media outlets to devote regular coverage to books and novelists. According to their own Web site, 34 million people tune into NPR stations every week, and almost 27 million listen regularly to at least one NPR show. And NPR drives sales: as any bookseller will tell you, a guest spot on Fresh Air sends droves of right-minded Americans scurrying to their local independent.

Does NPR, arguably the most far-reaching book-review outlet in America, favor women or men? I tallied the genders of novelists reviewed or interviewed between August 1 and November 31, 2011, on the NPR shows Fresh Air, All Things Considered,Talk of the Nation, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition, and the WBUR shows On Point and Here and Now.

As it turns out, public media is worse than even the New York Times. Far worse. NPR and WBUR talked about male writers about 70 percent of the time. Of the roughly 60 works of fiction discussed on NPR, only about 20 were written by women. Of the six novelists featured on more than one program, all but Amy Waldman, author of The Submission, were men. Of the three novelists interviewed on more than one program, all were men. Terry Gross interviewed twice as many male as female novelists, and Morning Edition apparently dedicated no coverage at all to women fiction writers.

When Field and Stream Reviewed Lady Chatterly's Lover

Huh? 'Tis true!

From a post on Booktryst...

But why did they bother?

1959 was the year of Lady Chatterley; it was big news; the talk of the nation. More than any other novel, perhaps, it was, because of its decades-old notoriety as a novel with hot parts, the most widely known book in the country, the title familiar to everyone, even those who had little interest in reading or literature. The Grove Press issue (published May 4, 1959 with three printings of 15,000 copies each, before publication), was the first complete, unexpurgated, legal, openly distributed and sold American edition published, and it was a signal event in the contemporary United States. The erotic walls of Jericho came tumbling down - or, at least, began to crumble - in the wake of the Supreme Court's Roth decision of 1957.

Roth was a landmark case that redefined the Constitutional test for determining obscene material under the First Amendment.