Book Reviews in Literary Journals

Posted by Eric Miles Williamson

While the NBCC has been campaigning to keep book review sections in newspapers from shrinking, disappearing, and being monopolized by syndicates, very little attention has been paid to book reviews in America's hundreds upon hundreds of literary journals and magazines. And while our efforts are noble at saving the book review sections of newspapers, it seems to this Board member that the battle we're fighting will ultimately be lost. Newspapers exist to make money. They are commercial enterprises. The Hearst Corporation (from which I receive checks) is not, ultimately, concerned with advancing culture or belle lettres. It wants, like any other creature, not only to survive, but, as Faulkner says of man, to prevail. If book review sections do not pay as well as sections devoted to celebrity gossip, and do not, therefore, sell ad space that brings in as much cash as an expanded celebrity gossip section, then book review space will be cut. If the NBCC gathers 10,000, even 20,000 signatures in support of book reviews in newspapers, and those signatures from all around the globe, what does this matter to a newspaper executive in Seattle or Milwaukee or Detroit if only 20 of those signatures, or even 200 of them, are from his base of operations? If a newspaper has a circulation of 500,000 and 200 of those people want to save the book review section, while at the same time 100,000 people would enjoy reading about Brad Pitt's most recent workout at the gym, Brad Pitt's a-gonna win out.

This said, I believe the book review is in better health than it has ever been in this country. I have in front of me a recent issue of Kevin Prufer's Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing, the literary journal published out of the University of Central Missouri. It comes out twice a year, and the issue on my desk has 27 reviews totalling over 100 pages, some as long as 4500 words. None of these reviewers get paid a nickel. Also on my desk is American Book Review, for which I edit. We publish six times a year, and our most recent issue has 30 reviews, each of which is at least 1000 words. We pay fifty bucks, but we beg our reviewers to accept a subscription or a gift subscription, and most of them forgo the cash. Then there's The Georgia Review, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, The Southern Review, The Arkansas Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and hundreds of other literary journals published both independently and by universities. Thousand upon thousands of reviews published every year, many more, I'd venture, than published by the newspapers.

Literary journals rarely pay, and if they do, it's a pittance. And this, perhaps, is to the good. The people writing for the literary journals are not doing so to make a living. How many reviews in a month does someone have to write to make a living? If good pay, like the LA Times, is $400, then one would have to publish at least 10 reviews a month to even live like a squatter in Los Angeles. The people who write for literary journals, on the other hand, are not writing for the money: they're writing for the love of literature.

And it's literature they review. If you want to read a review of a book of poetry or short story collection of a book of criticism published by a university press (which is where most books of criticism are published), you'd better read the literary journals. It's unlikely you'll ever read a review of a short story collection by an unknown in a major newspaper unless the author or the house is very connected. Who reviewed Kevin McIlvoy's The History of New Mexico? Not the papers. The literary journals. And it's one of the best collections in recent memory, standing alongside Chris Offutt's Kentucky Straight and Mark Nesbitt's Gigantic and Larry Fondation's Angry Nights.

The book review won't die. But reviewers and editors will eventually have to face up to the fact of a non-literary general public. If they're concerned with having their say about contemporary letters, they might try querying a literary journal for an assignment. They'll have more lattitude, be able to write potentially at length, and their reviews won't appear alongside advertisements for the latest Harry Potter installment. Their reviews will apper instead alongside the reviews of other people who take literature with the seriousness of the people who write it. Ain't no ads for furs, cars, bestsellers, bras, stripclubs, car batteries, or time-share real estate in lit-mags: just ads for other lit-mags that most likely publish book reviews.