The Critical I: A Conversation With Oscar Villalon

AS PART of an ongoing series, the NBCC will be talking to book editors and critics around the country. We recently caught up with member Oscar Villalon, book editor of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Q: Is it common for a thirty-something year-old like you to be editing a book-review section?

A: For a paper our size (circ ~500,000), I don't think it's typical. For a newspaper that has a Sunday book-review section like the Chronicle, or, say, LA Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune or Washington Post, I think I'm pretty youngish. It's also unusual that I'm Mexican American and I'm running a book-review section. The only other Latino is Marie Arana of the Washington Post. We may be the only two book-review editors of color -- that I know of. But hey, that's publishing, too. We reflect the industry we cover.

Q: How many reviews do you run each week?

A: We used to run something like 15 reviews a week, but since June, we've lost two pages. Now in a good week we run about 10, but we've had as few as six. We're also running reviews in the daily Datebook section. We usually get about four of those in a week. We'll have to see how long that lasts, once fall comes around space gets really tight ...

Q: Why did the book section get cut?

A: They were trying to accommodate an ad supplement, and since our presses are antiquated the paper couldn't do it without the Book Review taking a hit. This happened to us in 2001 too -- the section shrank until it was almost gone. Our readers complained -- oh, did they ever complain. So we got the pages back. I'm hoping the paper will figure out some way to revive the section like last time. Maybe we'll run the Book Review on a different day -- there's nothing that says you have to put out a book-review section on Sunday. Or better yet, maybe publishing houses in New York will actually step up to the plate and realized that with the incredible circulation numbers for our book review and the LA Times and many others, maybe -- just maybe -- they shouldn't be dumping all their advertising money in the New York Times. The whole idea that New York is book country and publishers don't have to advertise anywhere else is just bogus.

Q: What's your typical workday like?

A: I get up early, check my email from home, go in to work, check more email, sort through books, do a bunch of crap that has nothing to do with putting out a book review but that I have to do because I'm a manager -- invoices, payments, budgets. Then somewhere I find time to actually edit book reviews, put together the section, assign reviews and other book-related stories. When possible, I try to assign author interviews and other book stories for the rest of the paper. That's very tough to do because I don't have anybody who's actually dedicated to that. It's a small outfit: myself, the assistant book editor Regan McMahan who works four days a week, and an editorial assistant.

Q: How many books do you get every day?

A: It varies. Fall and Spring you get a lot more than summer or winter, but it probably averages out to 60 or 70 books a day, at least.

Q: Does anyone help you sift through them?

A: Nope.

Q: Are there any rules that guide how you sort through and pick the ones you'll review?

A: Self-published and vanity press stuff, of course, always gets tossed immediately. If a book is regional and its region has nothing to do with the Bay Area, that gets tossed. The first things I look at are: How pertinent is it to the region, and how pertinent would it be to our readers? We don't review romance novels. We do genres -- SciFi, mysteries and thrillers -- in monthly roundup columns, so those get set aside for that. Everything else I pretty much hang on to and flip through. Of course that's the other big chunk of my time -- going through those galleys and at least reading a little bit into them.

Choosing which books to review is completely subjective. You look at the catalogs and get a sense of what looks interesting, who you like. It's pretty much the same way you decide what you'll cover in a newspaper: You just go by your instincts. Clearly you pay attention to what's in the news and which books could be related to that, but for the most part, it's about picking books you would like to read. You have to trust your instincts and hope readers like to read what you're interested in. If your interests are too esoteric, you're going to alienate a lot of people, and if your interests are too broad, you're going to pique very few people. It's got to be somewhere in the middle.

Q: What kinds of books do you like to cover?

A: We cover the whole gamut of literary fiction and nonfiction, including paperback originals and interesting reissues. A lot of science, a lot of stuff on Bay Area culture: books with gay, Latino, or Asian themes and subjects. Also, like the rest of the paper, we try to cover what things related to current concerns: Books that come out on Iraq, on oil, we're going to look at those more closely than other subjects just because they're on everybody's radar. With fiction, we try to look at a lot of new voices, voices from different communities that aren't necessarily reviewed in other sections. I'm sure that because of my own background we probably review a lot more fiction by Latino authors than sections in the rest of the country. Same with Asian authors -- that's definitely something we cover a heck of a lot more of. Anything Pacific Rim, of course.

Q: What's the role of the book review in our culture?

A: I suppose ideally, if reviewers are doing their job of trying to tackle the ideas of the books, then the book review sections should create a sort of intellectual conversation about our times, and get as many different voices as possible to chime in. Like any conversation, sometimes it can be more pedestrian, other times it's more striking because you get a critic whose mind is on fire and they really have something to say.


Interviewed by Elaine Vitone