Thursday Morning Roundup

Over at Huffington Post, Da Capo VP Lissa Warren weighs in on what the "decline and fall" of book review sections means to publishers.

Le Kiosque Media literary blog of Montreal makes note of Scott McLemee's insidehighered.com post on the NBCC Campaign in a post titled "Les cahiers livres, du moins ce qu’il en reste..."

The American Booksellers Association reports that sales have been "flat" in 2007, with the number of independent bookstores still shrinking, from 1,660 a year ago to 1,580 this spring.

BOMB magazine #100: KGB Bar reacts with reading on Sunday night, 7 pm, with Jill Bialosky (novel "House Under Snow,"two poetry collections, plus she's and editor at W.W. Norton & Company); Rivka Galchen, Mt. Sinai, MD 2003, Columbia MFA 2006, first novel forthcoming in the spring from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NBCC member Ed Park, a founding editor of The Believer, whose first novel is coming from Random House in 2008.

Where are We Going, Where Have We Been

THIS AFTERNOON, at 4:30 PM in the Paula Cooper Gallery at 521 West 21st Street (over at 10th Avenue), the NBCC and Bookforum will cohost a panel about the culture and history of the book review. As readers of this site will no doubt be aware, we're in the midst of a massive shift in priorities in the news business, and the NBCC's Campaign to Save the Book Review has tried in its own immodest way to draw attention to what's been happening at newspapers with regards to the book review.

In the space of a just a few months, several of our major newspapers have cut back their book sections (The San Francisco Chronicle) moved them to smaller print run days (The Chicago Tribune), folded them into joint sections (The Los Angeles Times), eliminated or not replaced their book editor (Raleigh News & Observer, Atlanta Journal Constitution), or just cut back on coverage in general (Arizona Star, LA Weekly). And the news keeps coming. More across-the-board cuts are on the way at several major newspapers -- cuts which will affect not just book criticism, but all of the arts -- even as strong empirical evidence exists to suggest head-count slashes always backfire.

So this is the culture now of the arts in America in our most popular print forum -- the newspaper, which (in spite of all the bad news) still has an average weekday readership of 124 million, or 57 percent of the adult population. There is good news about books in other arenas -- literary journals, television shows, radio, blogs, some online sites of print newspapers, some magazines and even online booksellers are doing new things with criticism -- but it would be a grave mistake for us to just step off the profligately burning boat of the newspaper industry and simply watch as it abdicates its role of providing for a large audience smart and intelligent coverage of literature.

Tonight's is the first of three panels the NBCC is hosting at BEA that will touch on this environment. The panelists at the Paula Cooper Gallery will be National Book Award winning novelist and critic, Joyce Carol Oates; president and publisher of Farrar Straus & Giroux, Jonathan Galassi; Executive Editor of Humanities at Harvard University Press, Lindsay Waters; and James Shapiro, professor of English and Comparative Literarture at Columbia University. Eric Banks, editor-in-chief of Bookforum, will moderate. You can still rsvp by emailing nbccrsvp@hotmail.com.

We hope you can make it, for we are at a critical moment, one that calls to mind an essay that Lindsay Waters published about the academy in the Village Voice just three years ago (when there still was a regularly appearing Voice Literary Supplement). Here's a section worth thinking about:

"The humanities must now take steps to preserve and protect the independence of their activities, such as the writing of books and articles, before the market becomes our prison and the value of the book becomes undermined. It was not always so. John Milton once wrote that good books are "the precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Today the humanist should look back to such expressions of illuminated belief. The task is to engage in constant re-examination.

If humanists do not keep firmly in mind what they are about, no one else will. Humanists study books and artifacts in order to find traces of our common humanity. I argue that there is a causal connection between the corporatist demand for increased productivity and the draining from all publications of any significance other than as a number. The humanities are in a crisis now because many of the presuppositions about what counts are absolutely inimical to the humanities. When books cease being complex media and become objects to quantify, then it follows that all the media that the humanities study lose value."

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Around the World on Wednesday

PACKING HIS BAGS FOR NEW YORK, Scott McLemee gives a shout out to the NBCC/Bookforum panel tomorrow at the Paula Cooper Gallery at 4:30 PM on the Intellectual History of the Book Review. The panel will feature Joyce Carol Oates, James Shapiro, Jonathan Galassi, and Lindsay Waters. There's still time to register. RSVP at nbccrsvp@hotmail.com.

NBCC board member Carlin Romano, who will be moderating the NBCC's panel on reviewing ethics Friday at BEA, enjoys the new Michael Chabon novel but wishes for a little more of Bellow's intellectual heft.

NBCC winner Martin Amis accompanied Tony Blair on his final trip to Washington, part of Blair's farewell tour.

A Missouri bookstore owner is burning his books in protest of the decline in book culture.

Library Journal reports that Olga Grushin has won the Young Lions Fiction Award. NBCC board member Barbara Hoffert interviewed her last year.

Hazel Rowley on back when intellectuals were rock stars.

Maud Newton -- who will be on the NBCC's panel on the crisis in newspaper literary coverage this Sunday at BEA -- reminds that when it comes to bitchy insider portraits of the literary world no one does it like the British.

Go for a walk with NBCC winner A.R. Ammons.

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Teresa Weaver to Work at Habitat for Humanity and Atlanta Magazine

LAST WEEK, the AJC's former book editor Teresa Weaver gave her notice and signed on with a full-time job at Habitat for Humanity, working as a senior editor and writer in their Atlanta office. Teresa will also become Atlanta magazine's book editor and writer. Both organizations are very lucky to have her. After 19 years at the AJC, 9 of them on the book desk, she will bring a lot of good ideas and passion to the job. Here at the NBCC we're extremely pleased that in this difficult environment for newspaper professionals our colleague has landed on her feet.

Many questions remain as to what direction book coverage will go at the AJC. If you're curious about this issue, and you want to be part of the conversation, toss out ideas, or simply hear about how the changes in newspaper reviewing affecting all parts of the publishing industry, come to Book Expo America this Sunday. At 10:00 AM, in room 1E11, AJC feature editor Melissa Turner will be part of an informal panel discussion on the question of newspapers and book coverage. Also particpating: Oscar Villalon of the San Francisco Chronicle; Stacey Lewis of City Lights Books; Heidi Julavits of the Believer; Maud Newton of maudnewton.com; and Mike Merschel of the Dallas Morning News.

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NBCC Campaign, Part 2

On April 23, the National Book Critics Circle launched a six-week Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to help preserve book sections and book culture. The campaign has been conducted mostly online, here on the NBCC board's year-old literary blog, Critical Mass.

What's next? Having raised questions and aired conflicts (thanks, all, for your input), the NBCC will continue and broaden the discussion by sponsoring a series of panels at Book Expo America. (Details on the blog.)

The posts on Critical Mass over the past five weeks offer a snapshot of American literary culture circa 2007, which is evolving faster than many readers, authors and book critics can absorb. Solicited from authors, editors, journalists, book critics and others involved with books and literature, the posts offer a diverse and wide-ranging set of viewpoints--as might be expected from a group of critics and passionate writers and readers. Among them: Richard Power, George Saunders, Rick Moody, Lee Smith, Andrei Codrescu, Roxana Robinson, AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) president Catherine Brady, Sheila Kohler, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Richard Ford, Nadine Gordimer, Sara Paretsky,Stewart O'Nan, Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Adam Hochschild, Nicholas Christopher, Bill Roorbach and Abby Frucht's MFA students from Vermont College; book editors from the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the American Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Orleans Times Picayune, the Jewish Forward, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, as well as Bob Mong, editor of the Dallas Morning News, Mark Sarvas, who writes the literary blog The Elegant Variation, and Carrie Kania, who described an inclusive approach to getting the word out about books she publishes: print, radio, television, online, including MySpace pages, literary blogs, bookstore websites.(Read the blog and the comments for the flavor of the sometimes heated discourse.)

The related op ed pieces, editorials, interviews, literary blog posts, reports and reactions also are linked here. To name a few: Salman Rushdie on the Colbert Report, Scott McLemee in insidehighered.com, Art Wallace in Huffington Post, Bookbabe Ellen Heltzel on Poynter.com, Michael Connelly in the Los Angeles Times,David Kipen in Salon, NBCC president John Freeman in The Guardian and in BBC and NPR radio interviews. Motoko Rich in The New York Times, "Are Book Reviewers Out of Print?" and The Los Angeles Times's Josh Getlin, "A war of words breaks out between print and Internet writers as newspapers cut back coverage" focused on an artificial conflict between print reviewers and literary bloggers. "These generalizations are especially damaging because it gets in the way of an important truth --we're all pitching in to the same conversation,"Freeman wrote in one blog post. "Whether it's on screen or in print, on a podcast or through the tabloid your subway seatmate has open on her lap next to you, this swirl of debate and opinion, cant and artful critique is all part of the same froth about books. It's how our culture thinks about itself, displays and digests its wisdom, gives a platform to intelligent (we hope) voices, and sifts signal from noise. Which is why the NBCC is prepared to fight for it -- smart, informed, well-crafted criticism is essential to our culture, to our democracy and to the improvement of our arts...[W]e wouldn't be staging this campaign from a blog, across the web, linking to bloggers and asking other bloggers to contribute posts if we didn't believe in the medium's capacity to bring intelligent debate to books. Nor do we believe that print reviews have a monopoly on good writing or contextualizing...But right now the fight that needs fighting is not for blogs (which are doing just fine), but print pages..."

Meanwhile, the sea change in newspaper book reviews continues:
*The Los Angeles Times combined its book section with the "Ideas" section; the book review's editors launched a blog and expanded online book coverage to include four monthly columns.
*The Chicago Tribune shifted its Sunday book review section to Saturday, with a smaller circulation (the book review is available online in a handsome pdf format).
*The Atlanta Journal-Constitution eliminated its book editor's position. The NBCC organized an online petition (last count, 5600-plus names, including Norman Mailer, James Lee Burke, Melissa Fay Greene, Chimamanda Adichie) and (with the help of Atlanta-based book publicist Shannon Byrne) a Read-In at the offices of the AJC attended by Atlanta booksellers, novelists, professors, readers. The May 3 Read-in was covered in Publishers Weekly, Creative Loafing, Baby Got Books, CNN.com (Todd Leopold's "Who reads books anymore?" drew dozens of comments), The Wordsmiths blog, and Atlanta-based television.
*The Raleigh News-Observer eliminated its book editor's job and shifted the editor, former NBCC board member Peder Zane, to Ideas columnist (he wrote his farewell column on May 2; novelist Lee Smith responded on Critical Mass later that week).
*The New York Times Syndicate, taking advantage of the cutbacks in book pages around the country, offered a package of book reviews to make up for the lost content. The Washington Post followed suit.
*The Minneapolis Star Tribune cut staff to the bone (but not the book review editor).
*The Columbus Dispatch book editor launched a book-related blog.
*The UC Berkeley Journalism school has named as its new dean Dianne Lynch,dean of journalism at Ithaca College. An online specialist, Lynch founded a national association for online journalists, wrote a textbook on digital media ethics, and created a student film festival for movies shot on cell phones.

Back to Work Links

NBCC finalists Dave Eggers, David Mitchell and three other non-Daves have written a relay story published over at the Guardian.

Speaking of relay, over at New York Magazine, five dozen critics call out the names of the most overlooked books of the past decade.

In the same issue, Peter Carey speaks of the catch-22 of being a writer in New York when "the national newspapers are performing the surgical removal of their book-review pages like slick lobotomies."

NBCC winner Marilynne Robinson reviews Harold Bloom's anthology "American Religious Poems."

Podcast audiences grew by 18 percent last year.

Erica Jong is still waiting for a woman to get the Serious Novelist chair. Meanwhile, sparks flew at the 2nd Forum on Democracy and Political Reform in the Arab World when Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr said she was for all women being treated equal to men.

What is it really like at Cannes?

NBCC finalist Eliot Weinberger's "What I Heard about Iraq" will be on stage in London June 6 through June 10.

Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao is interviewed on the eve of the Sydney Writers Festival.

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Saturday Roundup

Bill Eichenberger, an NBCC member since 1988, has just launched a new blog called "The Book Blog." Eichenberger joined The Columbus Dispatch in 1985, became the pop music critic in 1989, a position he held for nine years until he replaced George Myers, Jr. (the original Dispatch blogger) as the book critic in 1997. Eichenberger contends that he added 50 points to his IQ the day he became book critic and insists that “my worst interview with an author was still better than my best interview with a musician.” Eichenberger notes that he will blog about books "at least until Americans forsake the written word and give themselves over entirely to American Idol."

Watch a YouTube clip from Bill Moyers's hour-long interview with Maxine Hong Kingston in connection with her new book, "Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace." For 15 years Kingston has led writing and meditation workshops for veterans and their families. "My hope is that through art, through telling their stories, by having people hear what they went through, it changes them again," Kingston tells Bill Moyers. "There's the coming home from war, being broken, feeling losses, but then there is a wholeness that takes place if the person were able to write their story, to write their poem, to have people hear them and listen and understand. Then they are changed again." See the hour-long interview, read some of the poems by vets and blog about them here.

NBCC member Edward Pettit reviews the new Tolkein novel in the Philadelphia Inquirer.Pettit writes the The Bibliocathery blog.

NBCC president John Freeman discusses the Campaign to Save Book Reviews on Wisconsin Public Radio here. He notes how heartening it has been to receive support from so many sections of book culture in this country, including authors such as Norman Mailer who have been savaged by book reviewers. He also mentions how many newspapers are expanding online and giving the community a chance to discuss. What about the Internet? "There are so many resources on the Internet that didn't exist before, it's almost like you have a personal library connected to your computer," Freeman tells Joy Cardin. "The one drawback is that it's not well-sorted for you. You have to have a computer and an Internet connection, and not everybody does yet. I don't want to leave behind those readers who aren't online looking for books."

Jon Wiener talks with Michael Chabon about his new novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

Advance note: The launch of The New School's writing program's literary magazine LIT 12, featuring readings by Stephanie Anderson, Ed Park, Rebecca Wolff, Ismael Beah and Sampson Starkweather, is coming up Wednesday, June 13th from 6-10 PM, Wollman Hall @ The New School,66 West 12th Street, NYC, 10011.

Critical Outakes: Khaled Hosseini on the Plight of Women in Afghanistan

On May 22, Khaled Hosseini published his second novel, "A Thousand Splendid Suns," the story of two women who grew up in different eras in Afghanistan and wind up married to the same man. This is an excerpt from a conversation which took place in Manhattan this week.

Q: It's astonishing the difference between the childhood of your two characters in "A Thousand Splendid Suns." Mariam grows up poor, unschooled, with virtually no opportunities. Laila, who is born just a decade or so later, has school, friends, a boyfriend even. And then all that is taken away. There must be a whole generation of Afghan women who grew up with Laila's opportunities. What happened to them in the past two decades? Is there a huge sort of untapped human potential in Afghanistan?

A: Yeah, and it's a tremendous waste what the Taliban have done. Those urban professional women who had aspirations to achieve something, those were the women on whom the Taliban placed the greatest burden, the positions and the restrictions they placed upon them. Those were the women were most affected. The rural areas Taliban style oppression has been going on for centuries, but in the professional urban areas the women there truly suffered the most, because they were not accustomed to that at all. This was a very dramatic change in their lifestyle. And so you had essentially no production out of 50 percent of the population. And there is simply no hope for Afghanistan that follows that.

Q: Do you see any steps from the Karzai government that says to you they understand this is a serious issue?

A: You know, it depends where. In Kabul, things for women have improved. There are women in the parliament. Although I just read that the most outspoken member of the parliament was suspended. But we have women in parliament, women in the ministries, women back in the work force. But in the rural areas, there are places changes have not been able to reach. There's always been a divide between the countryside and Kabul, and the elders in the countryside have always treated the reforms of Kabul with contempt. But there are constant setbacks. There was a woman named Safia Ahmed Jan who was the head of the Ministry of Women's Affairs, very very active woman in human rights. She enrolled women in schools, she advocated the education of women. Last September, she was leaving her home in Kandahar, motorcycle pulls up, puts a bullet in her head, rides off. That's the kind of opposition they face. Build a school for girls? They burn it down. They threaten, intimidate teachers, kill them. Tell people if you send your girls to school we'll kill you. That's the difficulty they're facing.

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Reminder: Three Big NBCC Panels at BEA

NEXT WEEK, Book Expo America will come to New York. In keeping with the Campaign to Save Book Reviews, the NBCC will be hosting three book reviewing panels at the fair which touch on a variety of the issues raised by the changes in book coverage and book culture.

THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CULTURE OF THE BOOK REVIEW: A Bookforum Event
Thursday, May 31st, Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 4:30 PM- 5:30 PM

Where did the book review come from? What form has it taken? Who has read it and what purpose has it served in American arts and letters? Join Bookforum editor and NBCC member Eric Banks for a multi-faceted look at the genealogy of the popular book review. Panelists include James Shapiro, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University; Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award winning novelist and critic; Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities, Harvard University Press; Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. RSVP required (nbccrsvp@hotmail.com)

ETHICS IN BOOK REVIEWING: The More Things Change.....
Friday, June 1, Javits Center, Room 1E06, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

NBCC board member and Philadelphia Inquirer literary critic Carlin Romano will moderate what promises to be a lively discussion on the practice and ethics of book reviewing, drawing from results of a newly updated NBCC survey of hundreds of working book critics. Panelists will include Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review; Christopher Hitchens, author and critic; Francine Prose, author, critic and president of PEN America Center; David L. Ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; and John Leonard, Ivan R. Sandrof Award-winning critic.

THE CRISIS IN NEWSPAPER REVIEWING: Where are we going, where have we been?Sunday, June 3rd, Javits Center, 1E11, 10:00AM -- 11:00 AM

Newspaper book reviews are in a state of change. Where are we going? Where have we been? Join the NBCC for a panel which cuts to the heart of much recent debate. Panelists include Mike Merschel, book editor of the Dallas Morning News; Melissa Turner, incoming features editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution; Heidi Julavits, founding editor of The Believer; Stacey Lewis, publicist of City Lights Books; Maud Newton of maudnewton.com; and Oscar Villalon, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. (there has been a slight change in this line-up)

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Thursday May 24 Roundup

Two-time NBCC finalist Frances Fitzgerald discusses the legacy of Jerry Falwell on the New Yorker website.

Balakian finalist and NBCC member Andrew O'Hagan takes on the question of trash in his essay, "The Things We Throw Away."

NBCC president John Freeman was interviewed on BBC Radio's "Open Book" and on Wisconsin Public Radio about the Campaign to Save Book Reviews.

Two NBCC members, Ruth Franklin and Meghan O'Rourke, debate Don DeLillo's "Falling Man."

Nelson Algren, interviewed in 1955 by Terry Southern, via the Paris Review.

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwall has taken a "cyberstalker," described as "another, less celebrated author, [who] had stalked her on the internet, causing emotional distress and damaging her reputation," to court in Virginia, in a case described in The Guardian.

Meanwhile, Guardian blogger Shirley Dent notes, "It is daft to pit print against blog when it is what is said and the quality of thought that matters."

Sara Paretsky on the Number 7

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, a petition, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure that owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Q: Shortly after you published your first book, you started an association dedicated to determining whether female crime writers were getting a fair shake in reviews.

A: Yeah, that's what Sisters in Crime did – or has done – is monitor book reviews. When we started, what we found – the Druid Review lists every crime novel published in the country published every year. So we had a count, how many were by women, how many were by men. And if you looked at it and weighted the numbers, we found a book by a man was seven times more likely to be reviewed in a national publication then a book by a woman was. So we said, maybe men write twice as well as we do, but we don’t think they write seven times as well as we do. So we started writing publications – we’d just write and say you’re not looking at books by women, and this is a list of books by women that we think merit attention that were published in the last quarter that we think you overlooked. We found we didn’t have to be confrontational, that people were pretty responsive just knowing that we were looking at them. But then when we stopped monitoring they went back to the previous habits. So it’s kind of an ongoing project.

Q: What was the response to this -- did you find that people were receptive to the idea that reviews could be more fair?

A: Yes, sure. Librarians make their buying decisions on reviews – you have to be reviewed in two, maybe three national publications before a library will buy a book – bookstores what they are going to stock is based on what’s getting reviews, but if the book reviews are dying, what are they going to base their decisions on?

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A Conversation with Harper Perennial Publisher Carrie Kania

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure that owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. Here is a publisher's perspective.

Q. How do you let the world know about the books you publish?

A. We treat every book differently. We try to figure out who is the person we want to reach, and build it up from there. A lot of assumptions. We do a lot of work online. We have a MySpace page . That's just a small thing we do. It certainly must be effective. There are readers online, as are bookstore owners and librarians and bookstore clerks. It's a great way to get the word out. We depend on word of mouth. It's an old-fashioned but still effective marketing tool.

Q. But you're doing it in a new-fashioned way, if you're doing it online.

A. Things change and you have to be able to change with them. What we did 10 years ago may not be effective today. What we do today may not be effective in 10 years. We all need to be flexible and willing to experiment and try new things. We owe it to our authors to do that.

Q. What forms do you find effective online?

A. Peer marketing, word of mouth. You grow to trust a website or friends. And whether that's a blog or a bookstore website or a MySpace page, it's important to get our books in the hands of the right people.

Q. Is there a bookstore website you can use as an example?

A. Powells.com does a tremendous job. I'm a big fan of their website. It's one of the best bookstore websites out there. It's the experience you get when you walk into a store. They've been able to replicate that experience online. Really hand selling, with recommendations, news, It's a nice informative website. They have a Powell's blog, with authors who guest blog. There are recaps of what is going on in publishing today, an award just announced, a book that was just reviewed. It's a good way to keep people interested.

Q. And literary blogs?

A. I know there has been a lot of discussion lately of the importance of bloggers to the industry. I think they are important. Whether you write for a newspaper or a magazine or you're just my mom, and you tell me about a book you like, I think opinions matter. The blogging community is important to the industry.

Q. Are there specific literary blogs you turn to?

A., I browse around. I have Google alerts about books I'm looking for. I'm a surfer on the web. And I'm always interested to see where my search leads me. I always try to take a different path. There are wonderful blogs. The guy who runs a website called Chekhov's Mistress is an interesting guy. We have sent him books, he has talked about the importance of poetry and literature in translation on his blog. He seems very smart.

Bookslut. That's a great site. It's a smart site. They just did an interview with Tao Lin, which I thought was really interesting. Ned Vizzini did the interview. Bookslut matches people well with people who are the reviewers. When you look at it and see the number of novels, nonfiction and poetry being represented on Bookslut, that's wonderful. It's very wide reaching, and includes poetry and translation. Bookslut was one of the first ones out of the gate who showed publishers that websites and blogs are important and they have something to say. Today authors like Nathan Englander participate on Bookslut. Maybe in 2002 that wouldn't have happened.

Q. Do you also go to print publications?

A. Yes. Newsappers, magazines, long lead, from the largest to the smallest, are still an important backbone to the industry. We should do all we can to support them and help them exist.

Q. It's important to cover all bases?

A. Absolutely.

Q. Do you have an author out there now?

A. Today Chip McGrath wrote a great piece in the New York Times about a book we just published called "Dishwasher." Pete Jordan is the author. That was wonderful to wake up to this morning. Pete is embarking on a tour, doing events at stores like Quinby's in Chicago. He's at Atomic Books in Baltimore tomorrow night. He was on NPR Sunday. "This American Life."[He chronicled his dishwashing journey on the show.] He has "All Things Considered" coming up. We just did a great event at Mo Pitken's on Avenue A and Third Street. Talk about covering the bases, he has a MySpace page . People magazine is going to run something. It's nice to see a book like this get nice wide coverage. He's on Bookslut right now.

Q. Any special plans at this year's upcoming BEA?

A. I'm going to be on a blogging panel at the Bookseller Day in Brooklyn, talking about how bookstores can get involved in blogging as a way of reaching out to the community via their websites. The Harvard Bookstore MySpace page has is friends with and links to the local coffee shop, local record shop, shops on Harvard Square. It's a community thing.

Gritty as Opposed to Magical Realism from Latin America

Francisco Goldman, who moderated the "Gritty Realism" panel at the recent PEN World Voices festival, proved an expert guide through the shift from magical realism to "gritty realism" in the work of a new generation of Latin American writers.

The four authors on the panel, whose work is set in the sometimes violent, sometimes fragile metropolitan landscapes of Lima (Daniel Alarcon), Medellin (Jorge Franco), Mexico City (Guillermo Arriaga), Rio and Sao Paulo (Patricia Melo), provide a twenty-first century alternative to the great Latin American trio of Borges, Garcia Marquez and Vargas-Llosa. Their work reflects the migrations from the countryside to cities, from the interior to the coast, from the south to the north, with accompaniments of violence, dislocation, and cultural chaos. Fertile ground for fiction writers.

Alarcon, who is an associate editor for the Lima monthly Etiqueta Negra, read from Chapter 10 in his newly published first novel, "Lost Radio City." (The title refers to a radio program common now in metropolitan areas with chaotic migration patterns; people call into the program in hopes of tracking down missing relatives and friends.) In this chapter, Norma, who later becomes host of the radio program, is a young copy editor at the radio station during a time of repression and civil war. She witnesses a house burning. No one tries to put out the fire. A fireman on the scene tells her, "There's a man inside. He's tied to a wooden chair."

Alarcon referred to "a demographic shift" to urban from rural. "It's impossible to avoid intimate contact across class lines and cultures. That's part of the zeitgeist of Latin America now. The urban environment is the primary source material for our work." In his novel, the Latin American city recovering from war is unnamed, although he acknowledges it is based on Lima.

Guillermo Arriaga, best known for his screenwriting credits ("Amore Perros,""21 Grams," "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," "Babel"), read from his first novel, "The Night Buffalo:"

"Gregorio died in his mother's lap....He killed himself with the same gun we'd stolen years ago from a cop guarding the entrance to a convenience store. It was a rusty .38 Brazilian revolver...The bullet crossed diagonally through his brain, bursting through arteries, neurons, desires, tenderness, hatred, bones. Gregorio collapsed on the tiles with two holes in his skull. He was about to turn twenty-three."

Arriaga spoke of growing up in one of the most violent sections of Mexico City, of being beaten with a bat at age 11, of seeing buddies knived and shot. He mentioned Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison as influences, and railed against excessive political correctness and those who portray violence without moral consequence.

Jorge Franco was dubbed the "accidental pioneer" of a new wave of Colombian urban realists when his first novel, "Rosario Tijeras," about a female assassin in Pablo Escobar's Medellin, was published in 2000. (The opening lines:""Since they shot her at point-blank range while she was being kissed, she confused the pain of death with that of love." )

Franco noted that violence has always been part of literature, reading back to Homer's "Iliad." "Urban violence is something we live and breathe now in Latin America," he added.

Rather than read from her novels ("The Killer" and "Inferno"), Patricia Melo offered a cogent analysis of the drug gangs and murderers-for-hire in contemporary Sao Paulo (population 17 million at the time she was writing her novel) and Rio, drawn from her research for her work. She said most of the contract killers she interviewed while working on "The Killer" were physically unimposing men recently moved to the city from the country, struggling for a sense of identity, feeling invisible. The gun, she said, transformed the nonentity into a somebody in a reverse Kafka-esque manner. Many of them saw themselves as "avenging angels."

Listen to podcast of the panel, with readings from the participants, here.

This Just in from the Washington Post Syndicate. Discuss.

There has been much discussion in the news and in our industry about the fate of book sections, sparked in part by the announcement by the Atlanta Journal Constitution that they would be cutting the position of Book Editor to save money for the newspaper. Many other major newspapers are merging book reviews into other parts of the newspaper or cutting them to bone.When editors are scratching their heads about how to attract a broader and younger audience, it helps to remember the relationship between the newspaper and book industries, summed up nicely by this observation from author Michael Connolly in the Los Angeles Times: "In the past, newspaper executives understood the symbioticrelationship between their product and books. People who read books also read newspapers. From that basic tenet came a philosophy: If you foster books, you foster reading. If you foster reading, you foster newspapers. That loss-leader ends up helping you build and keep your base."

On Salon.com, David Kipen evaluates editors' attitudes to book sections in relation to reading habits of their readers in "Last Exit to Bookland."

And finally, there's a take by our own Kathleen Parker in her column, "America's March Toward Literacy":

We have received over 500 e-mails from readers across the nation praising her defense of the book review.If you are examining your book coverage, we'd like to suggest Book World, a comprehensive collection of daily book reviews from The Washington Post. This feature can add excitement to your book pages at a fraction of what it would cost to produce these reviews in your own newsroom.

Book World subscriptions include six daily reviews that are sent to you on Wednesdays of the preceeding week, and a Sunday collection of a dozen reviews sent on Fridays. The full package accounts for about 20 reviews that can be used as you have space in print, or in their entirety online.

We hope you'll consider a trial to Book World and make a statement to your readers that books are important to your community and to the culture in general, and that your newspaper will be the authoritative critic they need....

Karisue M. Wyson Executive Sales Manager Washington Post Writers Group

How Book Culture in Lisbon Is Changing

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. There are some 5,500 names on our petition to save the book editor's position at the Atlanta Journal-Constutition (it's not too late to sign). Today we have a dispatch from Lisbon, where Philip Graham, fiction writer, editor, University of Illinois professor, has been on sabbatical and covering the literary scene there for McSweeney's.

For the month of May, Lisbon has officially designated itself as “a city of the book,” though in many ways that title could be applied to any month here, where writing and literature have a high profile. Even minor literary prizes are given notice in the press, and when the Portuguese surrealist poet and painter Mario Cesariny died in November, all the major newspapers devoted their cover page to the story, and a hefty chunk of the inner pages as well— the first seven pages of Diário de Notícias were entirely devoted to a retrospective of his life and work. It’s hard to imagine an American newspaper honoring any writer in such a fashion.

Just walk through any neighborhood in Lisbon and you’re likely to come upon a street or praça named after a writer. The street I live on honors a journalist,and from the window of my apartment I can just make out the edge of the Jardim Fernanda de Castro, a garden named after a writer of plays, poetry and fiction. Newly released books of poetry receive at least as much attention as works of fiction (the genre of nonfiction is far from chewing up the literary landscape here, as it does in the States). One study reports that Portugal’s rate of reading has increased, though a recent cartoon claimed the explanation was Portugal’s aging population spending more time peering at the fine print of their various medication instructions.

Lisbon has gone all out in celebration of this month, with a larger than usual number of literary events scheduled. The huge Parque Eduardo VII hosts a book fair, there’s a festival of films based on literary novels, and the National Library is offering an exhibition of the manuscripts and private papers of the great 19th century Portuguese novelist Eça de Queirós. So far this May I’ve seen a theatrical adaptation of Gonçalo Tavare’s bitterly funny political fiction, O Senhor Kraus, at the Teatro Trindade, and caught an actor’s solo performance of selected poems by Fernando Pessoa, at the Casa Fernado Pessoa, where I also attended a literary panel discussing the politics of book prizes.

Nevertheless all is not well in Portugal’s literary scene. Just as in the United States, the review space for new books continues to shrink. Newspaper arts supplements like Publico’s Mil Folhas and Diario de Noticias’ Sexta have been discontinued, their usually expansive contents for the most part deconstructed into the stingy column space of the various daily editions. A biweekly publication devoted to literary matters, JL (Jornal de Letras), soldiers on (though there’s a consensus among writers that it could benefit from an injection of pizzazz), and the monthly Magazine Artes still offers good, smart literary coverage.

Writers like Jacinto Lucus Pires, whose novel, Perfeitos Milagres—Perfect Miracles—is being released next month, understandingly lament the loss of the reviewing venues. However, Gonçalo Tavares believes that the literary interview is a still vibrant form, one that many writers in fact prefer to reviews; there’s more space devoted to one’s book, and a writer being interviewed can have a say in how the work is represented. Even so, it has become increasingly difficult to bring a book to the attention of the reading public unless you’re one of a host of television personalities and news anchors who now write novels and receive the publicity and sales that far more serious writers can’t hope to achieve. The respected writer Rui Zink has found that his brief participation in a recent reality TV show as a judge (ah, only in Portugal—of the three other judges on the show’s panel, two were fellow writers) has increased media interest in his latest novel, A Espera—Waiting.

It all comes down to the continuing flat or depressed sales of newspapers and magazines in Portugal, which have brought about cutbacks and even a certain dumbing down of otherwise fine publications. In a culture where respect and honor for writers is so deeply imbedded, this is especially sad.--Philip Graham

PEN Announces "Beyond Margins" Winners

NBCC Fiction Finalist (and current contender for the Orange Prize for fiction) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel "Half of a Yellow Sun" is a winner of PEN's "Beyond Margins" award for emergent authors of color. Listen to her conversation with Michael Ondaatje at the 2005 PEN World Voices Festival here. The nonfiction "Beyond Margins" award went to Ernest Hardy for "Blood Beats, Vol. 1." Awardees in poetry: "Recyclopedia" by Harryette Mullen and "Theater of Night" by Alberto Rios. Judges for the award were Sarah Gambito, Marlon James, Achy Obejas, Max Rodriguez, and Thaddeus Rutkowski. The four authors will be honored in October.

Vintage Edmund Wilson Coming Back into Print

In October, the Library of America will publish two volumes of the work of the consummate literary critic Edmund Wilson, "Literary Essays Reviews of the 1920s and 1930s" ("The Shores of Light" and "Axel’s Castle") and "Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 1940s" ("The Triple Thinkers," "The Wound and the Bow," "Classics and Commercials").

The Library of America, which won an NBCC special award a few years back for "distinguished contributions to the enhancement of America literary and critical standards," announced the forthcoming publications at an event marking its 25th anniversary on Thursday night at the Morgan Library. The program, moderated by F. Scott Fitzgerald biographer A. Scott Berg, included an inspired pairing of authors: Tom Wolfe on Stephen Crane, Judith Thurman on Emily Dickinson, E. L. Doctorow on Herman Melville, Margo Jefferson on Charles W. Chestnutt, and Garrison Keillor on Fitzgerald. Keillor noted that Fitzgerald was "a great American failure whose name stood for a kind of dissolution and wasted talent," and that it was Edmund Wilson who put together the confessional "Esquire" pieces Fitzgerald had written in his decline for his final book, "The Crack-up," which revived interest in his work. Among the lines that resonated with readers: “I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

Wilson, who once remarked,"It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form," is considered the intellectual father of the Library of America. "Each book will be presented in its original form, i.e. this is not a 'Wilson reader' – and we anticipate further volumes to come, as yet unscheduled," says Geoffrey O'Brien, editor in chief.

The Wilson series will be edited by Lewis M. Dabney, author of "Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature" and editor of Wilson's last journal, "The Sixties." (In his review of Dabney's biography in the New York Times, Colm Toibin noted the complexity of Wilson's literary legacy, illustrated by a remark made by Wilson's son with Mary McCarthy, his third wife. "When Reuel, their son, was 9, he heard McCarthy, for once, praising her former husband. Reuel responded: ''Mommy, you mean my father is a great critic?'' He smiled, clearly remembering her previous invectives against his father, and added: ''I always thought he was just a two-bit book reviewer.'')

Nicholas Christopher on The Value of Book Reviews for Our Cultural Heritage

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

At a time when our social and cultural discourse is at a low ebb--reality television shows, attack radio, cheap voyeurism, an American president who canot speak coherently, a government that reflexively lies, films that are ninety percent special effects and ten percent dialogue--it is particularly disheartening that major newspaper and magazine outlets would be cutting back or eliminating their book review/feature sections. How a page devoted to book coverage in daily editions, and maybe a dozen pages in a Sunday newspaper, is deemed extravagent in periodicals that devote pages of ink to the drunken exploits (and rehab farces) of second-rate entertainers, replete with stories about their divorces, tattoos, automobiles, accessories, and underwear (or lack thereof) is disgraceful.

Where book pages are not being eliminated wholesale, they are being "merged" into so-called style sections, watered down and wedged beside low-calorie recipes, skin-care advisories, and restaurant plugs. Millions of Americans buy books, but apparently even the brief, cogent analyses of these books are considered insignificant by overseers of our corporate media.

Other industrialized countries with long literary traditions-- France, Japan, and Germany, for example--not only champion books by way of comprehensive newspaper reviews, but also regularly, often in prime time, sponsor in-depth author interviews on television. Newspapers in smaller countries like Greece, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands sustain exciting, wide-ranging book departments.

We have serious problems with literacy in the United States, and it is not just shameful, but stupid, that we would compound them by becoming a country in which books, and readers, are simply not served by major periodicals. I am a baseball fan and a film buff, and no matter where I find myself, in big American cities and farflung towns, my interests in those subjects is faithfully served by periodicals large and small. That I cannot say the same about books is a scandal. We will pay a heavy price for abandoning our cultural heritage through such short-sightedness, denying the generations to follow us the opportunity to become active and vital readers. Without the latter, we can expect to produce, and nurture, even fewer writers, at which point we'll really be in trouble: a country with a diminishing national literature and an utter loss of civilized values.

I urge every periodical that has cut back on book reviews to reverse its pernicious policies and, not just restore, but expand its literary coverage, for the common good and for its own good. Do newspapers think they can survive in an arid, soulless intellectual landscape, devoid of literature? The publishing industry could do its part as well, supporting journalistic book pages by purchasing advertising space, not just for obvious blockbusters and self-help screeds, but for serious books across the spectrum: poetry, science fiction, intelligent mysteries, history, biography, and fiction of all kinds--a whole world of reading into which they could infuse marketing energy and publicity dollars. This is not a problem without solutions, if people on all sides accept what is at stake here in terms of our national--and, more importantly--our spiritual heritage.--Nicholas Christopher

When two dozen critics argue over a national award, the process is rarely poetry

For those curious about The Larger Purpose of the NBCC and what its board actually does, here is an essay by board member Steve Weinberg, which originally appeared in American Way magazine.

On March 8, 2007, the National Book Critics Circle announced the recipients of its prestigious annual awards. After months of suspense, readers, writers, and publishers found out what 24 judges chose as the best biography, memoir, general nonfiction, novel, poetry volume, and cultural criticism of the year. It’s a mammoth task, because in each category, hundreds--or even thousands--of books are out there, waiting for a blessing from the NBCC adjudicators.

I am one of those 24 judges.

While what we do may seem presumptuous on one level, I can say with pride that during my nine (nonconsecutive) years as an NBCC judge, no unworthy volume has won. All 24 of us devote many, many hours to determining which six books deserve our approval as “the best.” Are there many profound disagreements? Yes, but we have never failed to reach a consensus.
Things can turn ugly, of course. On the way to the honor, some winners suffer verbal assaults behind closed doors, via Internet chats, and in telephone conversations. When 24 professional critics set out to decide which is the best book of the year in any of the categories, opinions vary and emotions rise to the surface. The judges only rarely issue personal attacks on the authors or on fellow arbiters, but as individual judges make their cases for individual authors, their words can sting.

I felt that sting in 1995. Why can I recall it so vividly, even after a decade?
Because that was the year when I made a big difference — quite unexpectedly.
For months, I had been advocating what I thought was an amazing book as the most deserving general nonfiction title. Several judges mocked me to my face. Others, I learned later, mocked me out of my hearing. They thought my choice rather lowbrow. They preferred any of several contenders with more intellectual heft. Through my relentless, and perhaps obnoxious, advocacy, I had managed to push the book onto the short list of five finalists. Would it go any further? I doubted it and also began doubting my own judgment as its passionate supporter.

The book in question was "A Civil Action" by Jonathan Harr. If you haven’t read the book, perhaps you have seen the movie, released in 1998 with John Travolta in the lead role as a lawyer who falls into a controversy between residents of a Massachusetts town and a gigantic industrial polluter that might be killing children.

By the time the NBCC judges gathered in New York City to choose the winners, I had pretty much given up on the idea of "A Civil Action" winning. A straw vote on the five finalists at the beginning of our discussion seemed to validate my pessimism. It received one vote: mine.

As the debate about the five finalists unfolded, however, I sensed an opening. Each of the other finalists--first-rate books, by the way--had passionate advocates, sometimes as many as eight. But none could claim a majority. So I made my presentation, calmly but with vigor, about Harr’s immersion in the lawsuit and in the lead lawyer’s life for a decade. I explained the subtleties of investigative journalism, my specialty. I read aloud passages of compelling prose from the book’s 500 pages. I hope I was incredibly eloquent. Maybe I was just lucky. In any case, a few hours later, I stepped up to the miked podium on the stage and announced to a sea of faces, including Harr’s, that "A Civil Action" had been chosen as the best general nonfiction work of 1995.

It doesn’t always work that way. Last year, for example, I felt just as passionate about a general nonfiction finalist: "Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War" by Anthony Shadid. None of the other judges made fun of me, and some even voted with me. But the book that won was "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich.

Each winner brings its own type of joy. After all, the aftermath of Chernobyl is important to humanity. After all, Alexievich reported the book at great personal risk. After all, the book’s publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, is a small house that could use the recognition to bring more worthy books to the reading public in future years.

But I really wanted that Shadid book to win.Sometimes my favorites receive few other endorsements; even so, I am able to enrich my own mind and the minds of so many people I know because of my extra reading. I can cite dozens of books published in 2006 that broadened my horizons in ways I am unlikely to forget. "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" by Lawrence Wright provides searing insights into 9/11, Iraq, and what might turn into a faith-based war that will continue even after I die. Alicia Shepard’s dual biography of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein refreshed so much that I knew but had let slide about my own craft of journalism, a craft without which hardly anybody would know anything outside the neighborhood where they reside. Richard Powers’s novel "The Echo Maker" made me think anew about how human brains work and fail to work, about the inevitable complications of family relationships, and about whether Truth (with a capital T) is ever ultimately discoverable.

Well, time to return to my reading. You see, there’s this obscure biography I almost certainly will advocate as the best of the year. But several just-published biographies are waiting for my perusal.

-- Steve Weinberg is an NBCC board member and the author of six nonfiction books, none of which has won a National Book Critics Circle award.

Saturday Morning Roundup

NBCC board member Art Winslow considers William Langewiesche's "The Atomic Bazaar" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. See NBCC board member Steve Weinberg's take on "The Atomic Bazaar" in The Christian Science Monitor.

Don't miss this post earlier this month by Eric Rosenfield, Wet Asphalt, on the future of book reviews.

Library Journal Editor and NBCC member Francine Fialkoff, writing about the NBCC's "win win" Campaign to Save Book Reviews, notes that her own publication is learning to take advantage of both print and electronic options, concludes, "The conventions and venues for discussion may be changing, but the need for them all remains. Whatever the outcome at the [Atlanta] Journal-Constitution and elsewhere, the NBCC campaign to save book sections in newspapers is a win-win for us all. The group has engaged thousands of readers and writers in the survival of literary culture—and reading—and has begun a dialog that will lead us to the future. The conversation about books is flourishing on the web—and in print—in ways it has never done before."

On this podcast, NBCC president John Freeman talks about the crisis in print reviewing with BEA director Lance Fensterman.

In her review of Frank DeFord's new book, "The Entitled," NBCC member and Hartford Courant book editor Carole Goldberg calls the author "a master at the top of his game."

In The Guardian,David McKie fesses up to an obsession with spines.

Jason Berry, NBCC member and writer in residence at Tulane, heralds the return of culture to New Orleans in the Boston Globe.

NBCC's blogging committee is unplugged for the weekend, heading to farflung spots in the north, south, east and far west. Back on Monday with news of one of our favorite critics (although he thought of himself as a journalist, not a critic), Edmund Wilson.

A Little Unsolicited Info on Critical Mass, and Its Blogmistress

I'm the Critical Mass blog mistress, which means I solve formatting problems, answer late-night tech support calls, spend hours shrinking that cute little fox cartoon so he fits in the corner without covering any text ... fun stuff like that. As many regular Critical Mass readers know, I started this blog more than a year ago with hopes that it would become a place for lively conversations about books, and a way for the NBCC to communicate more fully and regularly with its members.

I haven't been posting much during the Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. In part, this is because I'm moving cross-country and finishing a book of my own, so I've had to shift my attention away from the blog for a while. It's also because my current term on the NBCC board ends this year -- I'm beginning to step aside so others (well, Lizzie Skurnick) can take over the tech side of running Critical Mass so it continues forth when I'm off the board. The Campaign has been organized and run primarily by John Freeman with the help of Jane Ciabattari -- they've gotten authors, bloggers, print critics and editors from around the world to contribute thousands of words on the topic, which are all archived here. These posts represent a tremendous range of opinions.

Why am I telling you this? To clarify some confusion. I get many angry emails from readers about some post or another on the blog. Those emails and many comments on the blog make it clear, people believe things posted here represent the views of the NBCC, and every blogger who posts here. That's simply not true. As it says on the left margin of the blog (and as I've posted in many comments), all opinions posted here belong to each individual post's author. They're not those of the NBCC or the Critical Mass bloggers as a whole.

Readers often assume that each poster has been chosen and vetted by the NBCC or its board to represent its views. Not true: The NBCC doesn't invite anyone to post here. Some posts are unsolicited. Many are invited by one individual blogger or another, but the rest of the blogging committee (myself included) often doesn't know who's posting what until we read it on the blog like everyone else.

The NBCC is a large organization with lots of opinions. This blog is simply a venue for many of those opinions, and the opinions of others in the industry.

And with that, I sign off of Critical Mass ... See you in a few months.

Some Data to Add to the Mix

Recent Nielsen/NetRatings data released by the Newspaper Association of America:

Visitors to newspaper websites are online more frequently than other Internet users (72.6 percent versus 57.8 percent); 87.7 percent of them are online five or more times per week.

Newspaper readers are reading newspaper blogs; traffic to blog pages at the top 10 newspapers in the country increased 200+percent in the year ending December 2006.

Combined print and Internet readers of 49 daily newspapers account for more than 70 percent of the U.S.

Growth in online newspaper readership is double the growth rate of the overall online audience; a record 59 million people (37.6 percent of active Internet users) visited newspaper websites during the first quarter of 2007 (that's up 5 percent over the previous year).

This from Susan Sontag, Plus Joshua Cohen, Book Editor of I.B. Singer's Publisher

Mark Oppenheimer's review of Susan Sontag's "At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches," in this week's "Jewish Forward," reminds us of one of the traditional roles of the literary critic: "'[I]t seems unlikely,' [Sontag] writes, 'that there are still masterpieces in major, intently patrolled languages waiting to be discovered. Yet some ten years ago, rifling through a bin of scruffy-looking paperbacks outside a bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road, I came across just such a book, "Summer in Baden-Baden," which I would include among the most beautiful, exalting, and original achievements of a century’s worth of fiction and parafiction.' By the end of this essay, she has persuaded the reader of Tsypkin’s necessity, incidentally offering meditations on a question that must have preoccupied Tsypkin himself: 'Loving Dostoevsky, what is one to do — what is a Jew to do — with the knowledge that he hated Jews?'

"But the essay is grander still," Oppenheimer continues. "Lauding Tsypkin, Sontag is asserting an almost forgotten role of the critic: someone who discovers new things for us to love. That was how Edmund Wilson saw the critic’s job, but is that how James Wood or Lee Siegel sees it? Perhaps, and in any case, I admire both men. But maybe because they write in prominent places, and for the masses, they take fewer opportunities to share curiosities found at the side of the road.

Which brings us this addition to the ongoing dialogue about book culture from Joshua Cohen:

This great Cassandra cry over the disappearance of book reviews and literary criticism (because they aren't the same thing) from the pages of our newspapers and magazines is a diverting little Apocalypse--though ultimately a tempest in a teapot, I have to think, which steams and pours, if you'll excuse a steep mixing of metaphors, almost exclusively for a virtual, or digital, thirst.

Today,information is incredibly dispersed--not only thanks to the Internet, and there on blogs such as your own, but also amid the print pages of many newspapers and magazines (yes, with Internet presences) whose "mainstream" visibility speaks nothing to the size and engagement of readership. I am thinking, primarily, of the paper I work for, the Jewish Forward: to be found online and at your local newsstand, published weekly on trees.

I am writing this email entirely in a private capacity, and nothing I say here should be construed as any sort of official opinion. Each week, "The Forward's" Arts & Culture section, edited by Alana Newhouse, offers discerning coverage of Jewish books. This last month hosted reviews of such writers as George Konrad, Lamed Shapiro, Michael Chabon, Nathan Englander, and others. "The Forward" was founded in 1897 as a socialist paper, in Yiddish - it's retained its liberal, tough voice to this day. Trotsky wrote for its pages, as did Nobel laureate I.B. Singer...

Granted, Jewish bookery is a little self-limiting - but intelligent,self-critical community might be the very savior of literacy and what used to be called "discourse" in what's become a highly diffuse, and indirect, age.

Lee Smith on the Changes at the Raleigh News and Observer

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. Today novelist Lee Smith writes about the changes in the literary life of Raleigh.

Last Sunday, May 6, the Raleigh News and Observer contained our excellent book review editor Peder Zane’s goodbye column, “Back to the Mainland,” in which he likened the book pages to “an island off the coast of the News and Observer. While the rest of the paper reports the news of the day, we carry news of the spirit,” he wrote, using one of my favorite phrases.
In fact, I once named a book “News of the Spirit,” a phrase George Garrett had employed in critiquing a somewhat pedestrian and obviously commercial short story in a long-ago creative writing class. “It’s very well done,” he said gently, “but I’m not reading any news of the spirit here….”

No literature, that’s what he meant. No serious discourse upon art, philosophy, history, religion, culture, morality, beliefs and ideas; no insight into how it is and what it means to be human in this world.

No news of the spirit, in other words. And we are not going to get much news of the spirit in the future pages of the News and Observer, either---not to mention the Atlanta Constitution and all the other newspapers that are “re-organizing” their book pages out of existence. Many smaller papers have already---quietly---stopped their own local books coverage, now relying on chain and syndicated columns and reviews.

But literature is relentlessly local, of course---whether the locale is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha or Eudora Welty’s Morgana or Wendell Berry’s Port William. Writers are local, too. In the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill area where I live, you can’t throw a rock without hitting a writer. If local books coverage stops, then the local writing community---with its corollary culture of literacy work, readings, school visits, workshops, classes, and festivals of all kinds--- will have no voice, no forum, no billboard. Our cultural literacy will decline immeasurably.

Peder Zane wrote, “When newspapers diminish books, they diminish themselves.” They also diminish the readers, who are being dumbed down from the top by corporate consensus. Zane’s new job as “ideas writer” cannot possibly come anywhere near replacing all the ideas contained in all the books reviewed in depth and substance on a ny Sunday in his former pages. I’m going to miss him. We are all going to miss him, as we are all going to miss Teresa Weaver. But I have a cynical hunch that no matter how vocal our large literary community is about it, it just won’t matter. It’s all about money, and it’s a done deal. Atlanta has called itself (famously) “The city too busy to hate.” Now it’s the city too busy to read. These big chains don’t care. Books coverage doesn’t bring in any money; and newspapers are all about money now, threatened as they are by the uncertain future of print journalism as a whole.

And on a very personal note…..what does this change mean to a novelist with a new book just out? I found out with my recent novel “On Agate Hill,” published last fall. It was getting pretty good reviews most places-----though fewer reviews, I felt, than with previous books. Then I got one really unfavorable review by an influential critic in a major city----which was reprinted in about 20 other newspapers that had cut back on their own local coverage and were using syndicated book reviews. I was talking to my husband about “all those bad reviews” the book got---this is my own negative sense of the experience, my feeling about it-----and he said, “Wait a minute! It got ONE bad review, carried in 20 papers.” I was stunned to realize that this was true. But as newspapers decrease their own reviews, this scenario will happen more and more often to all of us, on a larger and larger scale. (I imagine ONE reviewer, finally, who will decide everything……)

Another impression: I would take issue with the notion that blogs will somehow replace newspaper book reviews. During a recent visit with a local book club, a group of 16 well-read, highly intelligent women, I asked how many of them had recently read a book review on a blog. The answer was, nobody! Then I asked if any of them had EVER gone to a blog to read book reviews. Again, nobody. The average reader---the average person---just doesn’t do this yet. Maybe we read reviews on Amazon, but that’s it. Readers read book reviews because they happen upon them in the newspaper.--Lee Smith

Frankly, My Dear, You Should Give a Damn

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. Shannon Byrne, an Atlanta-based publicist for Little, Brown,offered this response to Mark Sarvas's two-part post earlier this week on Critical Mass and on his own literary blog,The Elegant Variation.

Sorry, Mark. Time to wake up from your misguided dream that “newspapers are dying” and should be learning from bloggers about how to evolve. See, I’m afraid that the food chain does not move in that direction when it’s called progress. Last time I checked, which was 5 to 7 daily e-newsletters ago, bloggers stay pretty busy sorting through, and hyperlinking to the major newspapers and other media each morning (often throughout the day), so that they can send all the rest of us, who are ostensibly too busy to sort through the chaotic, information-overloaded world ourselves, the Cliff’s Note’s version of all of the major headlines and gossip of the day. Seems to me, then, that the majority of bloggers (not all of them) actually function to critique, organize, and sort actual media rather than to generate much original literary criticism or innovative content themselves. You illustrate my point right off by positioning your post in response to the Los Angeles Times and New York Times.

The best blogs are wonderful tools and welcome simplifying resources. The worst of them are mini-altars of self-worship, which are obsessed mostly with how many “hits” and how much “traffic” they get than with the quality of their offering. How can you claim that a newspaper’s “wider readership” is a fallacy when one could just as easily allege that the number of pings and pongs and “hits” a blog gets can be fixed by strategically linking to the most googled topics and names of the moment and to the sites of all of your blogger buddies? Why bust on Publishers Lunch for tracking and archiving book reviews, when clearly the reviews here are used by a variety of people within the publishing industry.

Seriously, though, blogs are kind of like parasitic microorganisms which feed off of a primary host. For the sake of this discussion, the host is clearly print media. Some are the good bacteria and some are transient and viral. Or maybe I can upgrade blogs to the status of some sort of interstitial or synovial fluid, buffering the vital organs of the media (newspaper, television, radio, the Internet)? But, c’mon, if newspapers are dying, then blogs are the maggots come to feast upon their corpses.

Those in the business of publishing quality newspapers should take a look at all of the clutter and sheer chatter ping-ponging around cyberspace and continue to print good, even better, newspapers. These newspapers will stand out in a less commoditized way precisely if they do not make the mistake of simply remodeling themselves into primarily digital formats. Maybe now that attention’s being called to the perceived dispensability of book review pages, then a major paper like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution will see fit to do something radical like be the third among only two others in the country to publish a stand-alone book review section.

And who said anything about “the death of reading?” Or that the disappearance of newspaper book sections would “kill books?” Why does this campaign need to be called a “saga?” How did you make the leap from the NBCC’s goal to raise public awareness to somehow being able to see the future, a future involving a newspaper industry collapse and more glory for bloggers like you? Talk about false prophets (dead giveaway is to deny that one can see future). I just cannot get over how condescending it all sounds when bloggers act like what’s happening with newspapers is something they’ve known about all along. Whatever. You say you know that deep inside there should be no opposition between the online and print sides of book reviewing, but clearly you have some sort of triumphant smirk about all of this.

I think it’s fair to say that the point has always been that book culture is at risk with the continued reduction in space devoted to print books coverage. To be clear, the NBCC has asked the important question of whether we’re just going to watch this happen, and if we have given any thought lately to just how meaningful print books reviews have always been and continue to be, or if we’re going to be proactive. I think it reflects a particular genius that the NBCC board and their blog, Critical Mass, have brought together, in one place for all to see, the staggering details of the spate of downsized book review sections across the country.

How can you suggest that the NBCC is just pittling around with “the short-term problem in Atlanta?” What is happening in Atlanta can have a critical bearing on what happens at other newspapers. The Atlanta Read-In and the print and online petitions which have circulated here have demonstrated action, garnered national attention and further galvanized the literary community here—and the activism has only just begun. Atlanta is the latest major city to axe its book review editor and was therefore the clear choice as the NBCC’s focus of their national campaign. It is completely ridiculous for you to speculate about how many Atlantans or actual AJC subscribers signed the petition. What, am I supposed to feel guilty for not paying fifty cents a day for the paper and therefore ineligible to sign the petition? Back to your argument that a newspaper’s circulation is a fallacy: many non-subscribers read the papers lying around at coffee shops. Some grab from recycling bins. Some buy here and there. Anyway, I can tell you that a majority of the signatures are from Atlantans—except for one Dinty W. Moore, a beef stew brand, and Zora Neal(e) Hurston, who died in 1960 in Fort Pierce, FL to be sure.

Look: I am proud of Atlanta’s literary community for not sitting on its ass when the news hit that Teresa Weaver would be out of a job and that the paper would not have a book review editor forward moving. The petition and Read-In have stirred up a lot of dialogue and have genuinely gotten people excited. I’m sick and tired of people thinking that the only American thing to do is to hit someone in their pocketbook when you’re not pleased. To them that’s the only form of political action they know. To buy or not to buy. Spending power. To sanction or to endorse, and to act entitled in the almighty role, not of citizen, but as customer, consumer.

There are other ways to be heard than to kick the AJC while it’s down by demanding that people cancel their subscriptions. We can do more than simply dump our proverbial tea into Boston Harbor. I knew we had somehow gotten through when the editor of the AJC said that she recognized a number of her own friends’ names on the petition. We’ve promised to present the AJC with ideas of what they might consider doing, so as to protect the integrity of the books coverage to come. Maybe after the new features editor goes to BEA the paper will realize that they need a book review editor after all. I sure hope so.

Richard Powers on the Shared Solitude of Reading

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. We recently asked four-time NBCC finalist Richard Powers if he could share with us his thoughts on what function reviews serve in our society today, and how they can do it better. Here is his response.

PEOPLE PROBABLY HAVE as many reasons for reading literary reviews as they have for reading literary novels. For me, narrative is values in collision – commitment and confusion and crisis unfolding over time. In a great story, we are challenged to see the world through someone else’s eyes. Any attempt to interpret the world puts a character’s – and consequently a reader’s – values on the line and leaves them up for grabs. The best kind of readers, like the best kind of literary characters, are not the same people coming out of the story as they were going in.

So my favorite kind of reviewing doesn’t stand apart and judge that narrative process; it takes part in it and extends the web of relations between values and facts that the book itself explores. The breathtaking and beautiful review reveals its own meta-narrative: here’s who I, the reviewer, am in the presence of this book, and here’s what happened to me as these characters made and unmade themselves. The reviewer becomes yet another character in the contested collisions that narrative unfolds. I know a good review – whether I’ve read the book under review or not – when I finish the review thinking about the world differently than when I began it. A good novel makes me a more robust character in my own life. A good review makes me a better reader of my own and others’ narratives.

The problem is, changing technology invariably produces its own head-on collision of values. The cost of conveying information has plummeted, and we are converging on that moment when everyone will be able to know what anyone else thinks about anything at any given moment. Ideally, I think this is great: it’s the logical extension of the promise implicit in that ancient and most destabilizing of technologies, writing. The complication, of course, is that noise and signal both become cheaper at the same rate, and the novels and reviews that are most capable of making me a better reader may well become harder to find, even as they become more numerous and more thoughtful and more robust. We are in danger of drowning in an ocean of liking or disliking.

I honestly don’t think our crisis is print reviews versus blogs, specialization versus populism, or even the exclusivity of the elite versus the tyranny of the majority. I think our crisis is instant evaluation versus expansive engagement, real time versus reflective time, commodity versus community, product versus process. Substituting a user’s rating for a reader’s rearrangement threatens to turn literature into a lawn ornament. What we need from reviewers in any medium are guides to how to live actively inside a story.

Reading is solitary; reviewing is the shared solitude of reading. As throughput accelerates and the cost of information falls, engaged seclusion and slow reflection become more valuable. Changes in technology change the terms of this contest, but not the stakes. Like any good crisis, this one can only be resolved through narrative – the turbulent act of figuring out how to read what’s writing us.

Here’s Roberto Calasso, in Literature and the Gods:

In the delirium of their love affair with the microchip, people insist on asking tedious questions about the survival of the printed word, while the truly extraordinary phenomenon that is everywhere before us is never even mentioned: the vertiginous and unprecedented concentration of power that has gathered and is gathering in the pure act of reading.

--Richard Powers

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.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Change (Part 1)

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. Before we started this campaign last month, we asked NBCC member Mark Sarvas, of The Elegant Variation, for his thoughts on these issues and the future of reviews and here is what he had to say.

I have been mulling over this post for weeks now, watching developments with interest and, perhaps, a trace of unease. It's an unease borne of a growing sense that the wrong story is being told.

I was, I admit, disappointed by the recent New York Times article, which hewed to the reviewers vs. blogs storyline. (Josh Getlin's Los Angeles Times article went a considerable distance toward recasting that storyline.)

I am divided, pulled in three directions – as a blogger, as a book reviewer, and as a novelist with a debut on the way. The blogger in me wants to say, above all, that (Richard Ford, Michael Dirda and a few intemperate bloggers notwithstanding) bloggers and print journalists are not – and should not be placed – in opposition. The story, as I keep suggesting, is much bigger than that.

As a soon-to-be-published novelist, I can't help but watch with alarm as book review pages are hacked away.

But here's the thing that concerns me most as I watch this saga unfold – and it's as a fledgling book reviewer, peering into the future. Even if this campaign is successful in restoring Teresa Weaver's position – a truly noble and laudable cause - it's only a matter of time until this battle surfaces again. And again. I applaud the impulse that animates the support for Weaver but whatever the outcome, it doesn't seem to engage the big picture. The battle might be won but the war will be lost. I think the NBCC should consider expanding the circle of its creative energies beyond the short-term problem in Atlanta and face the larger questions here, the most significant of which, I believe, is:

How do people get their information today?

I realize some of what follows is unlikely to endear me to some members of the NBCC but I think an unwillingness to take up some seemingly intractable questions bodes poorly for the future. I'd like to touch on a few things I've observed during this debate:

Beware the alarmists: Whether it's coming from Ford or Howard Zinn (although it's disappointing coming from a historian), bleating about the end of civilization as we know it is tedious. Nearly every age has its Cassandras declaring the death of reading. Books have been killed by radio, cinema, television and, most recently, the internet. (In On Liberty, John Stuart Mill decries the fact that the people no longer take their opinions from books ... but from newspapers!) I side with those who take heart in the number of titles published each year, in the crowds in book stores and at events like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and PEN World Voices, and who think it will take more than the disappearance of book pages from newspapers to kill books. They are made of sterner stuff.

Beware the echo chamber: It's gratifying, indeed, to see so many writers come out in support of all this – or is it? I am struck that the proliferation of editors, reviewers and authors signing the petition all have a vested, financial interest in continuing book review pages. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but too few have acknowledged how much easier that makes it for those in power to dismiss this enterprise as nothing more than enlightened self-interest. I wonder – how many Atlanta residents or AJC readers are on the petition? Some probably, but too few. Which leads me to:

The Reader has the power: The readers have to respond, make their voices heard and – above all – their purchasing power felt. I'm a great admirer of David Kipen and he's been on both sides of the editorial divide so he knows way more than I do but I couldn't help but wonder if his assessment of this scenario was colored by some wishful thinking:

Will this campaign work? The facile answer is, say you're a newspaper publisher. You've got some bolting stockholders on line 1 and some angry brilliant midlist writers on line 2. Which call would you take? But the intelligent answer is, as always, nobody knows.

I'm either facile, a cynic, or a realist but when I put on my publisher hat, I look at it this way: I have some editors, writers, reviewers trying to save their livelihood – none of whom actually reads or buys my newspaper – sending me petitions telling me what to do. Why should I listen?

What if, instead of bolting stockholders, line 1 (or petition B) has subscribers canceling their subscriptions and advertisers pulling their ads? To a large extent, readers get the book reviews they deserve – or settle for – and they are the ones who have to make their voices heard above our own. (And the fact that readers probably don't have the commercial muscle to influence advertisers should be another big piece of this discussion. One certainly never sees Sports sections being cut, and if Don Imus were a book reviewer, he might still have a job.) Which leads me to:

To continue reading, follow this link to The Elegant Variation to hear Mark's thoughts on change and the way of the future.

Star Tribune Retains Book Editor

There is little joy in this, especially as the paper cuts one quarter (75 people out of 300) of its newsroom staff, but an organizational chart posted at the Star Tribune yesterday showed a book editor. But there will be no orchestra critic, no architecture critic/reporter, no TV critic or fashion reporter. It remains to be seen how much space books will retain in the paper. Who knows what economics are involved in this decision, but it would probably be good if people in the executive chairs at the Star Tribune read James Suroweicki's recent "New Yorker" piece on the effects of downsizing.

"Over the past decade, many academics have looked at how layoffs affect stock prices, and they’ve found that the seven-per-cent rule is bunk. Instead of rising sharply, the stock of companies that trim their workforces is likely to fall. A recent meta-study that surveyed research from several countries, covering thousands of layoff announcements, concluded that, on average, markets had “a significantly negative” reaction to job cuts. Individual companies, of course, sometimes see stock prices jump after layoff news, but there’s no evidence that downsizing is a guaranteed hit with investors.

This isn’t to say that Wall Street has gone soft—it still cares about profits, not people. But investors seem to understand that fewer people doesn’t always mean more profits. Downsizing may make companies temporarily more productive, but the gains quickly erode, in part because of the predictably negative effect on morale. And numerous studies suggest that, despite the lower payroll costs, layoffs do not make firms more profitable; Wayne Cascio, a management professor at the University of Colorado at Denver, looked at more than three hundred firms that downsized in the nineteen-eighties and found that three years after the layoffs the companies’ returns on assets, costs, and profit margins had not improved. It’s possible that these companies would have done even worse had they not downsized, but for the average company the effect of layoffs on the bottom line appears to be negligible."

*

A Quick Roundup

Now that he's done with Vietnam, Tom Bissell is in Rome working on a new book about the tombs of the 12 apostles (actually, the 13 apostles).

NBCC member and former board member Donna Seaman has launched Openbooksradio.com, an online portal for her wonderful Chicago-based radio program, Open Books, "a show about outstanding books, remarkable writers, and the fine art of reading." The site is filled with audio files of great interviews with writers (Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Banks, Mary Gordon, and Philip Lopate, to name just a few); she's got a new blog there, and she'll be adding interview transcripts and other content soon. So check it out.

New Jersey is not all mobsters, big hair, and stinky turnpike (she says, sitting in her Jersey City office). A group of top writers has banned together to tell the real stories behind their often maligned state in "Living on the Edge of the World: New Jersey Writers Take on the Garden State." Interested? Jonathan Ames, Lauren Grodstein, and Kathleen DeMarco will kick off a series of readings from the book at KGB on May 29th (7 pm).

The Asian American Writers Workshop talks with Peter Ho Davies about how a physicist ends up writing novels about race, class, and cultural divides, and what Star Wars has to do with all that.

And Vonnegut Street sounds exactly right for 48th street near 2nd ave, where Vonnegut spent much of his career, and was often seen sitting on his favorite bench in bench in Dag Hammarskjold Park. Later this month, the city council will consider making the name official.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Stories

From Sara Paretsky's new collection of essays "Writing in the Age of Silence"

"I was a person raised to serve, who came of age in a passion for justice. My character dovetailed neatly with the times. My own sense of voicelessness also led me to see and feel the anguish of the powerless.

I had been writing since I was old enough to read, short stories that were, or at least tried to be, funny takes on the world around me, occasional mysteries, lots of fantasy. After my summer in Chicago, I started trying to write more naturalistic stories.

As a child, the worst thing about the Holocaust to had been the thought of so many people dying nameless, without anyone remembering them. As a young adult, I had the same fear about the people I'd been working with. No one would remember their stories. It became my mission to do that."

**

Howard Kurtz on CNN, Plus The Guardian & Chef Gordon Ramsay

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Howard Kurtz covered the NBCC-led protest at the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the NBCC Campaign to Save Book Reviews in his CNN show, Reliable Sources, at the end of a broadcast that included references to Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Boxers or Briefs and Alec Baldwin. Here's a snippet from the transcript:

HOWARD KURTZ: Newsroom budgets are strapped these days and publishing companies aren't doing as much print advertising. That is how it works. Food sections get supermarket ads. Auto sections get car ads. Travel sections get vacation ads. Since book reviews deal with exactly one product, it's hard for them to survive without plenty of publisher's ads...but books are important to our cultural life. In fiction, from John Updike to Philip Roth to J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter," certainly. But in journalism as well. Just look at the impact of such books as Bob Woodward's "State of Denial," Tom Ricks' "Fiasco," Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor's "Cobra II," and the debate over George Tenet's new book.And you would think newspapers, in an age of Web surfing, would want to encourage reading.

I wish this plot had a happy ending, I read books. I write books. I love books. There are more book blogs these days, and that is great. But book reviews are an important part of the conversation in this country. And regional papers can help highlight local authors.

The best-selling blockbuster types, Tom Clancy, John Grisham and the rest, will be fine, but thousands of other authors need book reviews to call attention to their work. I wish more newspapers would recognize that. It is, after all, something you can't get on TV.

NBCC president John Freeman writes in The Guardian, "Clearly, the web holds enormous possibilities for cultural coverage, some of which is being driven forward by the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Los Angeles Times, not to mention Poetryfoundation.org. The AJC will no doubt join them. But in the meantime, until broadband penetration reaches 100% in Atlanta and beyond, there are those other people who like a little ink on their fingers. Those people who buy the newspaper with a few quarters out of machines which haven't changed much since the 1950s. It is important for editors of papers such as the AJC to remember these readers. After all, without them, the paper wouldn't exist at all."

The NBCC's online petition to save the book editor's position at the AJC continues to gather signatures (5460 last we looked), including that of celebrity chef/author Gordon Ramsay.

A Conversation with Ibtisam Barakat

Ibtisam Barakat, who lives in Columbia, Missouri, is the author of the memoir "Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood," published earlier this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. NBCC intern Melody Ann Adams of the University of Missouri, who is just wrapping up her internship this week, asked her a few questions. Melody will be interning this summer at The Missouri Review. Next year, her final year, she will be an editor at Vox (Mizzou's magazine) for the first semester. Thanks to NBCC board member and Mizzou prof Steve Weinberg for making her internship possible.

Q: Your memoir describes your journey as a Palestinian refugee in the aftermath of the Six Day War in 1967, yet the book is geared toward young adults. Why did you decide to write for a younger audience instead of an older audience who would be able to remember some of the events of the time?

A: The voice that narrates "Tasting the Sky" is a young person's voice because that allows the story its original authenticity and immediacy. I was a young person when that set of events took place. It did not even occur to me to find another voice for this memoir. Perhaps because empowering the voices of young people is a passion for me. I think that a large number of children in the world experience war and other atrocities that they have no choice in, and we hear very little about their experiences, especially directly from them. So I felt that I had an opportunity to be a strong ally to the child's voice in myself, and a strong ally to children in general. I think that a story well-told has no real limits to its readership.

Q: When did you first realize that you wanted to share your life experiences and write a memoir?

A: When I noticed that the Palestinians are often talked about in the media but are not talked with as often. I saw that the reference to Palestinians seemed to be devoid of emphasis on culture, literature, art and the creative and elements of life that truly tell the human story of a people. So I wanted to contribute to building a Palestinian narrative that is strongly anchored in the literary expression because literature has a genuine potential to be a richly unifying experience. It can lead us toward building a world culture of expanded understanding, empathy and inclusion.

Q: There's a scene from your book: "When a war ends it does not go away," my mother says. "It hides inside us...Just forget!" "But I do not want to do what Mother says...I want to remember." What do you hope today's generation will remember about the war on terror?

A: I hope that all people, not just today's generation, will arrive at an understanding that the very expression "war on terror" is rooted in a war mindset. It cannot produce peace. Indeed it adds to the terror and the misconception that the way to achieve safety is through war. I think what is needed is a large number of creative initiatives to address the root causes for strife in the world. Subduing whole countries and peoples cannot be a sustainable and lasting strategy for peace.

War creates wounds that last for generations. I think that one small percentage of a war budget turned to building friendships and understanding will achieve more safety and peace in the world than any war can. And there is a strong link between human rights violations, racial exclusion and oppression, imbalance of military and economic power in the world, and terrorism. The manipulation of words also adds to the confusion.

But ultimately, I think that what people all over the world crave is a sense of respect, kindness and creative possibility. War seems to destroy these gentle elements in life.

Q: You've lived in the U.S. since 1986. Where do you feel most at home?

A: In a sense I don't feel at home anywhere, and I can feel home everywhere. It's primarily conditional. The concept of home is an idealistic concept with the assumption that home provides safety, rest, peace, belonging, and all the wholesome values a person or a society aspires to have. And generally the concept of home largely refers to a state of being with people who are culturally similar to us, therefore we can avoid the experience of strife and adversity of being misunderstood or discriminated against by those "not similar to us." I do not have such experience except in islands of time. And more and more I see that many people do not feel at home, even while living in their homelands. In a broad sense, however, language is my home. And I feel that the human heart can extend itself to embrace everyone and end the violence that leaves us homeless--be it due to wars, occupation or forced separations. I have a poem entitled "Tea Invitation" that starts with these lines:

I write

for my heart

has become a country,

and I want all people

To live in it.

Q: What was it like to serve as a delegate to the third U.N . World Conference for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination?

A: It was one of the most memorable experiences for me, and the antithesis of the sense of isolation from the globe that is sometimes present in US life and culture.
What I will always remember from that experience is being at the stadium where the conference was being held and looking behind me. I saw people with every skin color, eye shape, and hairstyle, and wearing a variety of traditional clothing. The number of languages spoken reflected the endlessness of thoughts. They all sat so close to each other. Ever since that time, that's the image I think of when I need to think about audience or about the possibility of closeness between peoples in the world. It moves me beyond the illusion that the world is dominated by any one group, language, or view of life.

I believe that the ideal of the United Nations is essential to the world. In my mind, it represents people's longing for unity and inclusion. Whether the U.N. is successful or not in any particular project, whether it has made mistakes or not, and whether its internal or external structures are optimal, does not diminish its essential value as a unique organization looking to address crucial world issues. The numerous struggles the U.N. faces reflect the magnitude of the goals it takes on.

Q: What projects are you planning in the future, writing or otherwise?

A. I am working on a second book, a sequel to "Tasting the Sky," and continuing to search for new ways and possibilities to spark constructive communication, kindness and healing regarding the situation in Israel and Palestine. The Palestinians need a home, freedom from the occupation and peace. The Israeli need a home, freedom from being occupiers, and peace. I like to contribute to all that can take us closer to the reality of freedom to all.

Q. What are your thoughts on the dwindling space given to book reviews?

A. It seems to me that the decreased focus on books in newspapers reflects a social reality that defines "newsworthy events" in an increasingly limited way. A new episode of violence -- be it domestic or international -- seems to often be newsworthy. But is the birth of a new book newsworthy? And engaging the new territory with all of its possibilities for rational discourse, possible empathy, expanding perspective, challenging the norms, change?

The book is a cornerstone of culture. And how it is treated also reflects the culture that it is produced in. I would like to suggest the possibility of a national conversation between newspaper owners, book publishers, book critics, authors and readers regarding finding new ways that benefit everyone – for example rigorously promoting a culture that values more reading, arts, dialogue, questioning, and aware definitions of what constitutes newsworthy.--NBCC Intern Melody Ann Adams

A Quick Roundup

It looks like short stories are finally getting the respect they deserve.

Josh Getlin says enough already with all the nonsense about a major online vs. print reviews fued -- it doesn't exist (and I must say, I totally agree).

Rachel Sklar over at Huffington Post says hey, isn't it fishy that the NY Times reported on the decline of book review sections and the NBCC's campaign to save them, then promptly issued a press release pushing syndication of their book review section?

This year's NBCC Balakian winner Steve Kellman wants to know, "what's with Yiddish policemen?" He manages to squeeze three excellent Yiddish words ("tsoris," "kvetch," and "bubkis") into his review of Michael Chabon's new novel, about which he says: "Chabon has made egg salad out of hard-boiled genre fiction, moire out of noir."

Troy Jollimore talks about the events leading up to his NBCC poetry award earlier this year, and how very surprised he was by his win.

Susan Balee talks with former NBCC winner Jim Crace about Where "The Pesthouse" Came From. (A hint: Like much fiction, there was plenty of personal experience involved.)

And former NBCC winner Jonathan Lethem is fulfilling all kinds of childhood dreams.

NBCC Announces Three BEA Panels on the Book Review

IN JUST UNDER THREE WEEKS, Book Expo America will come to New York. In keeping with the Campaign to Save Book Reviews, the NBCC will be hosting three book reviewing panels at the fair which touch on a variety of the issues raised by the changes in book coverage and book culture.

THE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE BOOK REVIEW: A Bookforum Event
Thursday, May 31st, Paula Cooper Gallery, 521 West 21st Street, 4:30 PM- 5:30 PM

Where did the book review come from? What form has it taken? Who has read it and what purpose has it served in American arts and letters? Join Bookforum editor and NBCC member Eric Banks for a multi-faceted look at the genealogy of the popular book review. Panelists include James Shapiro, professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University; Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award winning novelist and critic; Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities, Harvard University Press; Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

RSVP required (nbccrsvp@hotmail.com)

ETHICS IN BOOK REVIEWING: The More Things Change.....
Friday, June 1, Javits Center, Room 1E06, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

NBCC board member and Philadelphia Inquirer literary critic Carlin Romano will moderate what promises to be a lively discussion on the practice and ethics of book reviewing, drawing from results of a newly updated NBCC survey of hundreds of working book critics. Panelists will include Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review; Christopher Hitchens, author and critic; Francine Prose, author, critic and president of PEN America Center; David L. Ulin, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review; and John Leonard, Ivan R. Sandrof Award-winning critic.

THE CRISIS IN NEWSPAPER REVIEWING: Where are we going, where have we been?
Sunday, June 3rd, Javits Center, 1E11, 10:00AM -- 11:00 AM

Newspaper book reviews are in a state of change. Where are we going? Where have we been? Join the NBCC for a panel which cuts to the heart of much recent debate. Panelists include Bob Mong, editor of the Dallas Morning News; Melissa Turner, incoming features editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution; Heidi Julavits, founding editor of The Believer; Stacey Lewis, publicist of City Lights Books; Maud Newton of maudnewton.com; Oscar Villalon, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review; and Arthur Salm, editor of the San Diego Union Tribune Book Review.

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That Atheism, It's So Hot Right Now

THIS WEEKEND, Christopher Hitchens' unequivocally titled new book, God is Not Great, lands at #3 on the New York Times list, joining Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and NBCC finalist Daniel C. Dennett in what has become a steady stream of books torpedoing religion. As Stephen Colbert says, it's the Unquisition.

You can hear Hitchens talk about it with Sam Tanenhaus here, at the New York Times' podcast, and at the Brian Lehrer show here.

Two other notes on the list. Former NBCC finalist Elizabeth Gilbert hits #1 on the paperback nonfiction list for her memoir of last year, "Eat Pray Love," ahead of 8 (!) other memoirs, while over on the fiction list former NBCC finalist Michael Chabon hits #2 with "The Yiddish Policeman's Union."

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Crime & Mystery Writers Supporting Reviews

ONE OF THE THINGS you might notice about the list of writers who have signed the petition protesting the cutting of the book editor position at the Atlanta Journal Constitution is the huge contingent of crime and mystery writers. There's Michael Connelly and Atlanta area author Karin Slaughter, Denis Lehane and George Pelcanos, James Lee Burke (pictured left) his daughter, Alafair Burke, Denise Hamilton, Ian Rankin, Laura Lippman, and many others.

In his editorial several two weeks back in the Los Angeles Times, Connelly talked about the support he received from early reviews, and wondered where Harry Bosch would be in today's reviewing environment. It was an interesting point -- since one of the internet's strongest features is the large number of free, easy-to access, virtual gathering places for active specialized fan bases which have sprung up. If you want it to be so, every week can be Edgar Week online, or Bouchercon, for that matter, given how much material is out there. No doubt if Connelly debuted today, these websites would notice.

And yet -- one of the points this campaign is trying to make is that, in addition to these active, sometimes intelligently conducted salons for enthusiasts and fans, which are great additions to the critical dialogue, we need bigger tent discussions as well. With book stores carved up into smaller and smaller genre fields, from chick lit to lad lit to graphic novels and so on, it's important that there's a place where books by writers, regardless of their genre, can be reviewed in front of a large audience by critics who have experience in the field.

That's somethings newspaper book sections -- which reach hundreds of thousands of readers, millions upon millions if you add up all the papers in the country -- have provided and should continue to provide. Until every American, regardless of geographical location or income level, enjoys their own broadband connection, these newspaper sections, be it the LA Times or the AJC, will continue to play a vital role in bringing these stories before readers. I think when Connelly worried about the future Harry Bosches of the world, that's what he was talking about: newspapers' unparalleled ability to reach the reader who just wants a well told-story, and perhaps finds it by accident on her way to the sports section.



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A Critical Mass of Writers Mobilizes on Atlanta

As the NBCC's petition to protest the AJC's removal of the book editor job nears 6,000 signatories, and readers, local booksellers, and AJC subscribers continue to express their support for literary coverage in Atlanta, writers continue to show their support. Here are a few of their names:

Norman Rush, Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, Harlan Ellison, Richard Ford, Richard Powers, Dennis Cooper (pictured above), Gish Jen, David Lodge, Anne Applebaum, Yann Martel, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jack Miles, Nathan McCall (pictured above) Sara Paretsky, Tracy Kidder, Julia Glass, Steve Yarbrough, Judith Thurman, Fay Weldon, Colm Toibin, Mohsin Hamid, Norris Church Mailer, David Mitchell, Reynolds Price, Allan Gurganus, Kim Addonzio, Chris Abani, Judith Freeman, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Hisham Matar, Clay Risen, Nicholas Christopher, Andrew Hudgins, Naemm Murr, Ben Fountain, Ken Foster, Melissa Bank, Erik Reese, Hester Kaplan, Denise Hamilton, Audrey Niffenberger, Kathryn Harrison, Louis D. Rubin, Adam Braver, Don Lee, Julie Otsuka, George Garrett, Chase Twichell, Anne Fadiman, George Saunders, Kevin Young, Gary Shteyngart, Michael Connelly, Karin Slaughter, George Pelecanos, Ian Rankin, Adam Haslett, Ali Smith, Stuart Kelly, Andrew O'Hagan. Ariel Dorfman, Bobbie Ann Mason, Connie May Fowler, Jim Dwyer, Anthony Swofford, Larry Dark, Craig Unger, Whitney Terrell, Maureen Corrigan, Chimamanda Adichie, Allan Kornblum, Emily Barton, David Anthony Durham, Michael Upchurch, Marisa Silver, Cathleen Schine, Christopher Coake, Sean Wilsey, Karen Bender, Pam Durban, Molly Giles, Alafair Burke, Laura Lippman, Lorraine Adams, Ammiel Alcalay, Arthur Phillips, Kenneth W. Davis, Michael Lowenthal, Karen Spears Zacharias, Michael Ryan, Debra Spark, Silas House, Joshilyn Jackson, Sheri Joseph, C.J. Box, Billy Collins, Meghan O’Rourke, Lisa Alther, Edward Hirsch, Herbert Leibowitz, Peter Kurth, Meg Wolitzer, Joshua Ferris, John Wray, Carolyn See, Brad Land, Stephen Burt, Joseph Skibell, Robert Crais, Clyde Edgerton, Joshua Clark, Terese Svoboda, Aliki Barnstone, Paula L. Woods, Joan Acocella, Tina McElroy Ansa, Lee K. Abbott, Benjamin Kunkel, Michael Parker, D.T. Max, Tayari Jones, Peter D. Kramer, Edwidge Danticat, Tom Barbash, Kelly Link, J. Peder Zane, Victoria Glendenning, Christine Schutt, Aaron Hamburger, Jan Burke, Victor LaValle, George Szirtes, David Liss, Chris Offutt, Donald Harrington, Hettie Jonies, Iain Pears, Madison Smartt Bell, Elizabeth Graver, Marina Warner, Jeremiah Healy, Alan Shapiro, Marie Arana, Heidi Julavits, Alan Cheuse, Helen Schulman, Diana Abu-Jabar, Jill McCorkle, Jim Shepard, Lawrence Joseph, Hannah Tinti, Peter Cameron, A.M. Homes, Clyde Edgerton, Matthew Klam, Chris Bohjalian, Darin Strauss, Mark Winegardner, Emily Raboteau, Francine Prose, Alaa Al Aswany, Adam Shatz, Tova Mirvis, Martha Southgate, Roxana Robinson, Alix Ohlin, Elissa Schappell, Richard Bausch, Lynn Tillman, James Lee Burke, Denis Lehane, Sheri Holman, Jennifer Gilmore, Pete Duval, Todd Gitlin, Karen Joy Fowler, Andrew Solomon, Joanna Hershon, Margot Livesy, Julie Phillips, Thrity Umrigar, Troy Jollimore, Robert Draper, Martha Cooley, William Logan, Carol Anshaw, Craig Nova, Rick Perlstein, Robert Anthony Siegel, Laurie Stone, Ben Marcus, Victoria Redel, Alan Cheuse, Benjamin Lytal, Clay Reynolds, Po Bronson, Susan Richards Shreve, Karen Abbott, Kate Christensen, Roland Merullo, Philip Caputo, Scott Heim, Shari Goldhagen, H.W.Brands, John Dufresne, Ron Rash, Melissa Fay Greene

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The Sunday Morning Ritual

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter

Weekend mornings used to be a real event. I would grind and brew my shade-grown coffee and spread the Dallas Morning News on the couch in front of me. After checking the sports page, I’d scout the book reviews, scissors in hand, clipping the intriguing ones (remember snipping coupons with your mother?) and stashing them in a folder. Next time I was online or in a bookstore, my folder would guide my purchases. Yet, as mainstream newspapers trim what they consider the “extras”--information outside the “hard news” of politics and accidents--they are jeopardizing my quiet routine, and one of the only real pleasures left in this electronic age.

Perhaps the gradual disappearance of book reviews also speaks to the book’s endangered status in our culture. Though I associate reading reviews with the leisure of Sundays, with the scent of coffee, with something vast and inky in my hands, nowadays I resign myself to reading reviews primarily on a cold computer screen. Amazon.com conveniently tracks my purchases and recommends “similar” books based on how I’ve spent my money.

While Amazon suggests books it “thinks” I’ll like, newspaper book reviews introduce me to books off my radar, books I wouldn’t encounter otherwise. Print book reviews also offer the authority, depth, and substance that online reviews often lack. So can’t I have my old Sundays back? I can’t cuddle up with my computer the same way I can with a newspaper—or with a book, for that matter.

--Kristen Keckler

A Conversation with Sheila Kohler on Book Reviews

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.NBCC member Heller McAlpin spoke with fiction writer Sheila Kohler about her reactions to the change in book reviews.

Q. As a writer of literary fiction, how important have newspaper reviews of your work been to you? Do you read reviews of your work? Have you ever learned from them?

A. Reviews are extremely important to me as a writer. They are what lets the public know about our books. Without them I don't really see how books could survive. I always read them--even the bad ones, and certainly I have learned from them, if only that different, qualified people have very different ideas about my work.

Q. Does your work get reviewed/discussed much on literary blogs? If so, how do those reviews compare with print reviews of your books?

A.Occasionally someone may mention my books in a blog. I believe the dangers of this indiscriminate reporting on books is that people who have no knowledge of literature can air their views as though they were of value and may influence readers. Critics may not always be right, of course, but at least they have read and studied literature, the great books, and have some outside knowledge to refer to when critiquing our work.

Q. What are your thoughts on what's happening to critical discourse in this country's newspapers?

A. I'm appalled that the review pages are being cut. It means that books are no longer to be taken seriously. What will happen to our children and our children's children without this essential means of getting to know others and themselves?--Heller McAlpin

Rushdie vs. Colbert: The Book Section Beatdown

"Do we need 350,000 books a year...except for a bonfire?"

If you missed Salman Rushdie's appearance on The Colbert Report last night, go to the show's most recent video box and scroll down to -- surprise -- "Salman Rushdie."

Vermont College MFA Program Students/Alumni Weigh in On Book Reviews

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter. NBCC member and author Abby Frucht asked students and alumni at the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program, where she has been a mentor and advisor for thirteen years, to write about the value of book reviews in their lives in the wake of the ongoing cutting of book pages. Here is her report:

What interested me most as I read what they sent is how many of them DO look to book reviews for discussion, affirmation, and revelation of cultural, moral, and social news. Recent VC graduate Wayne Lindeman writes that “(w)ith general conversations about...literature diminishing in our society ...serious reviews of literary novels help remind me of the ways in which a work can, and should, play out in the cultural arena as social conscience and meaningful art.” Novelist Brian Yansky writes, “We need book reviews to remind us that there is a culture that extends beyond Snoop Dog and the Super Bowl. Book Reviews are like libraries: they provide a place to pause and consider the ideas and stories that shape our world.” Editor and poet Michael Macklin writes, “This is not about litspeak, but rather about those who take the time to spread the word about work we find that has somehow changed us, that has had a real impact on our lives. It is about keeping the word alive that speaks to peace and hope and beauty.”

“If books teach us how to live, then book reviews teach us how to live well,” writes MFA student Dain Fedora. Patricia Spears Jones, author of two volumes of poetry, adds, “We are at a deeply critical moment in America - where our ideas and ideals are being manipulated and progressive thinking is under assault. How we as writers and thinkers respond to these times is as important as how writers and thinkers responded to the jazz age or the depression or McCarthyism. The essays, reviews and commentary in a range of newspapers give us a powerful insight into how these ideas were viewed back in the day - do we want to have the current ideas, ideals, and literary struggles erased?”

Many of those who responded to my query focused on the value of reading and on the importance of reviews in their personal and professional lives: MFA student Jason Wandrei writes, “It is clear that other, harder news, such as where celebrities have recently passed out drunk, eclipses the importance of achievements in the field of literature, but rather than supplanting the book review sections of papers, perhaps there is room for both this hardball journalism as well as book reviews.”

Bookstore owner Nan Wigington finds that reading is “my religion, my way of reconnecting with a disconnected humanity. The Sunday Denver Post book review page isn’t exactly my reading bible, but it is a good wayside pulpit. It lets me know what the new sermons are. Blogs can’t replace the printed review page. They are like shouts from the street, sometimes angry, sometimes thoughtful, but often hard to listen to.”

Recent graduate Janice Stridick, who especially loves “reading the book reviews on Salon.com,” relies on reviews “to keep me abreast of the important topics of the day” and to “represent the depth and diversity of our culture.”

“One of my favorite websites is www.librarything.com, where there are active dialogues on various books,” writes fiction writer Nadine Sarreal, who lives in Singapore and dips into numerous online sites for “news in the literary world... When I get on a plane...I take the International Herald Tribune precisely because I check the book review page. In the past year, I’ve bought at least three books because my husband clipped a review from the Singapore Straits Times and tucked it into my wallet. Two Monday columns I enjoy in the Philippine Star are Krip Uson’s ‘Kripokin’ and Butch Dalisay’s ‘Penman.’"

“It is sad indeed that today we can get a fuller breadth of information about new books from Amazon.com...than we can from our print media. The merchants have taken over a function that should be in the hands of an independent medium,” writes Betty Cotter. Pushcart nominee Maggie Kast writes that she gave her Blue Ridge Mountains sister a subscription to the New York Times Book Review. Why? “It gave her a window on the wider world. For me, reviews are part of the continuing dialogue among readers that takes off from a book, keeps it alive and feeds back into new writing.”

Creative nonfiction graduate Nathalie Dupree writes, “Many years ago I read a review of 'Master and Commander.' I was an unlikely reader for this book. I don’t sail, don’t like books with no women of consequence in them. One line ...caught me. I ended up reading the entire series by this author, becoming deeply entrenched in the writing, the historical references, and the characters. A book review changed my style of reading, my style of writing, and my style of research.”

Author Alexandra Chasin reads book reviews “because they provide me with a continuing education, allowing me glimpses of developments in fields in which I am not expert.” For Poetry graduate Michelle Demers, “reviews provide a broadening perspective that allows me to see beyond my own scope of experience. In addition, as a teacher of college writing classes, I use reviews as models of analytical thinking.”

Another writing teacher, Lauren Rusk, who since graduating in poetry has published poems, essays, and criticism, warns, “At Stanford University, my born-in-the-USA students write with the same odd usages as my nonnative speakers, and very few students follow their thoughts through logically on paper, presumably because they read fewer and fewer books. If yet another medium stops suggesting that books are exciting, what then? And what of Sunday mornings with the book review, surrounded by possible worlds to enter?”

Not all of my respondents are so keen on book reviews. First semester student Steven Axelrod sympathizes with his friends “who have become impatient with” what he laments as “the outright mendacity...and casual bad habits of criticism. For example, the classic back-handed dismissal. It’s a marginal smackdown that requires no evidence or justification, since it’s stuck somewhere in the corner of a dependent clause in a sentence that’s discussing something else. ‘Mr. A’s brilliantly evocative descriptions of the Amazonian jungle--so unlike Mr. B’s sterile urban street scenes--seem to anchor the character’s passions etc.’ You read that and you say, ‘Wait a second! How did Mr. B get in there? Which street scenes are you talking about? Sterile in what way? Define your terms!’ There’s no excuse for this kind of lazy cheating. If standards were more rigorous, readership (and review pages) wouldn’t be shrinking.”

“Oh the days of the thick, juicy New York Times Book Review,” writes poet/memoirist Joan Seliger Sidney, “when the newly published extraordinary poet could still dream of seeing her/his book praised or even panned, instead of passed over... Today, so few pages, so little diversity, no poetry.”

Poetry student Melody Berning calls reviews “my indirect muse, connecting me to small press books and especially works by lesbian/feminist and alternative gender communities.” Patricia McMillen says of the one review garnered by her chapbook of poems, “I do feel that it has affirmed and encouraged me greatly to have a second set of eyes (aside from the publisher) read my work and respond publicly to it.” Novelist Lisa Lenard-Cook,who was short-listed for the PEN Southwestern Book Award, knows “all too well that a lack of reviews can doom a book...before it’s even published.”

Ann Robinson,who has published a collection of short stories since graduating in 1997, concludes, “Who can exist without them? Not I. So there.”

Salman Rushdie on the Colbert Report

Tune into the Colbert Report on Comedy Central tonight at 11:30, 10:30 c., as Salman Rushdie will be talking to Stephen Colbert about -- among other things -- what's happening in America with book reviews, and why people like Stephen should care. After all, when Colbert reads a newspaper, he doesn't read the words -- he just absorbs the truth.

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Howard Zinn on Books Reviews, Truth and Democracy

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, a petition protesting the removal of the book editor position at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Q: As you've probably heard, there are cutbacks in numerous book sections across the country. What do you make of this trend, and is there any period in history when there has been such a reduction in the discussion of books in print?

A: Well, I don't know of any comparable period of American history when there was such a drastic cut back in the attention paid to books, and I think this is the worst it has been. I think it's part of a general tendency on the part of newspapers not to cut back only on reviews, but on foreign news reporting. I was just talking to a Boston Globe reporter who told me that the Globe has shut down its entire foreign news service. And this is true of a number of papers across the country. I think a lot of it has to do with television taking over the attention of people with more attention being paid to visual media – and it’s not a good thing at all.

Q: If you talk to newspaper owners, some of them will say there is more talk about books on the internet and in other forums, and that newspapers just can't compete in this arena anymore. That people will find book coverage elsewhere. Do you believe this?

A: Well, they have to hunt for it – newspaper editors are putting greater responsibility on the individual to find information which we normally would get in our daily newspaper. After all, there are still a lot pf people who don’t have computers, and are totally dependent on newspaper, so for those people simply telling me that to go and get information on the internet doesn’t help. So I think these cutbacks are unfortunately part of the dumbing down of the American public, which is supposed to be a highly educated public…and the cutback of book reviews sections and book reviews makes things worse, after all democracy depends on information, it depends on the public being informed, and the inattention to books, the diminished attention to books, is important because books are probably the least censored part of our culture. That is, while television and radio have been more and more monopolized, and newspapers are more and more concentrated in fewer hands, I have found as a writer that there has been more freedom in book publishing than in any other aspect of American culture – this in spite of the fact that publishing itself has been taken over financial and industrial moguls, like my own publisher, HarperCollins, which was taken over by Rupert Murdoch. But I think it is still true that books are the freest area. So when people ask me for sources of information, I tell them go to the library, go to the bookstore, because I think books are the last refuge from the lies and misinterpretations that are pushed down upon people.

Q: But I guess we have a problem here, because if books are written of less and less, and not everyone has a connection to the internet. How do people know a book exists? I tried to find a review of your latest book, “A Power Governments Cannot Suppress,” and aside from websites like Alternet, which were running excerpts, and the Los Angeles Times (which isn't online yet), I couldn’t find one.

A: No, you're right. There have been reviews in very tiny publications, but no -- no reviews in major newspapers.

Q: Was it like that when you first began to publish?

A: Well it’s always been harder for an unorthodox, or you could say dissident writers to get reviews. But my earlier books did get reviewed a lot more often, and in many more places than my present books. I'm thinking also of -- and comparing reviews during the Vietnam War era and reviews during the Iraq War. In 1967 I wrote a book called Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal, and it was reviewed in many major newspapers…Just recently Anthony Arnove wrote Iraq: the logic of Withdrawal, and so far as I can see it has received very few or no reviews in major newspapers. If you compare two books on similar situations, what has happened in 40 years – it's disheartening.

Q: So what should people do who care about this form of dialogue?

A: I wish I knew what the answer was to this question, because the only reply one can give in a situation like this is for people to seek out alternate sources of information, alternate newspapers, community newspapers, community radio, cable television.

But I also would suggest that people start campaigns to restore attention to book reviewing in those newspapers that have cut down on book reviewing. Presumably editors are somewhat sensitive to reader reactions. I think if readers didn’t simply accept these cuts passively, and they carried campaigns asking that newspapers restore the space and the attention to books, well, that would be one way to fight.

Q: Actually, the NBCC started a campaign just like that in Atlanta, where the book editor position was eliminated. With local readers and booksellers we petitioned the paper and met with the editor, Julia Wallace. We have a petition going that has over 5,000 signatures online and more at local bookstores.

A: Well I think what you just described and would be a valuable thing to do – in newspapers all across the country.

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Around the World in the Campaign for the Book Review

Ex-book critic David Kipen points out that book reviews are journalism's "indicator species. An indicator species is the newt or worm in an ecosystem that nobody much notices until it starts to disappear. And even then, who really misses another polliwog -- until six months later when, suddenly, even the buzzards are dead?"

In Pittsburgh, Bob Hoover takes the lay of the land on this issue, from Atlanta to Milwaukee, from Laura Lipman to Richard Ford.

In San Antonio, recent Balakian Award winning critic Steven G. Kellman says that "book reviews can and should offer something more than plot summary and verdict. They form part of the conversation that constitutes a culture. When that conversation fixates on Paris Hilton and Britney Spears and is silent about William Gass and J.M. Coetzee, that culture is in crisis."

In Chicago, Cheryl Reed sends out an S.O.S., while affirming the Sun-Times' coverage will last.

In Raleigh, signing off from a decade of stewarding the book pages at the News & Observer, Peder Zane gives a shout out to the critics who have worked to him, and gives a glimpse of things to come at the News & Observer.

The NBCC's petition protesting the decision to cut the book editor position in Atlanta continues toward 6,000 signatures. Among the latest signers: Eric Bogosian, Sara Paratesky, and Mohsin Hamid.

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This Just in From the New York Times Syndicate: Discuss

BC-BOOK-REVIEW-SERVICES-ADVISORY-NYT
BOOK AND LITERATURE FEATURES FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE AND SYNDICATE
ATTENTION MANAGING EDITORS, WIRE EDITORS, FEATURE, CULTURE AND ONLINE EDITORS: You may have noticed the recent New York Times article on the economic constraints that are forcing newspapers, as well as other publications, to cut back on their staff-produced coverage of books, authors and publishing. Even some wires services have followed suit.

But as this trend continues, reader interest in books seems to be growing. Industry figures show increases in adult book buying over the last two years, with public library usage also on the rise.
In recognition of these conflicting trends, we want to call your attention to several of our features and services that might help you satisfy your readers' appetite for book news and reviews -- without breaking your newsroom budget.

FROM THE TIMES NEWS SERVICE:
-- The New York Times Best-Seller Lists, which each week cover hardcover, paperback, how-to and advice books. Each of these lists is filed in short and long forms to meet your needs. Once a month, an additional list of Children's Best-Sellers is included.
-- A weekly Noteworthy Paperbacks column, with brief reviews of new paperback releases.
-- Reviews from award-winning critics like Janet Maslin and Michiko Kakutani from the pages of the Culture section.
-- Author interviews, news articles and features on books and the world of publishing, from both the business and the literary perspectives.
-- For clients of the complete New York Times wire, these are included in your current service and available daily.

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE:
-- The New York Times Book Review, a weekly feature service that now includes the "Editors' Choice," which lists recently published notable books, and the "TBR: Inside the List" column, which offers brief behind-the-scenes stories about recent best-sellers.
-- The New York Review of Books, considered by many to be the world's leading intellectual journal. In addition to its wealth of literary reviews, it also provides commentary on current events.
-- Podcasts and video, a new dimension to our services that can enrich your Web site. Podcasts include interviews with well-known writers and weekly chats between Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and authors, editors and critics.
-- We hope you find these suggestions helpful as we all navigate our way through a changing landscape.
-- Laurence M. Paul, Executive Editor, New York Times News Service and Syndicate
-- Michael Oricchio, Managing Editor, New York Times Syndicate.

And This, on Today's Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC

Leonard Lopate's show on the New York City NPR station today focused on critics speaking out. He began with a panel discussion titled "Why Are Book Reviews Disappearing?" (And what does it mean for readers and writers?) NBCC president John Freeman, literary agent Steve Wasserman, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Joan Acocella, a staff writer for The New Yorker weighed in.

Maureen McLane on the NBCC Book Furor

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

The recent furor over several events in the world of book criticism – e.g. the elimination of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s book editor position, the possible cashiering of its editor Teresa Weaver, changes in the LA Times Book Review – raises several questions, even as it raises our collective blood pressure as book critics, impassioned readers, and concerned citizens. Reading the eloquent posts on this and other sites (by Art Winslow, Nadine Gordimer, Rick Moody, among others), I am brought to ask: Am I truly passionate about books? (As opposed to, say, poems, or essays, or novels, or codexes, or papyri?) And am I committed to book reviews as they now stand? To book reviews sustained by and within newspapers? Is this what I am on the side of? Or is it that “books” and “newspaper book sections” carry something else in them, within them, that I cherish?

Sheer self-interest would seem to dictate that I support book reviews, especially those attached to newspapers. I owe my free-lancing life and critical opportunities to Elizabeth Taylor, Literary Editor of the Chicago Tribune and editor of its books section, to which I began contributing in 1996. Yet I worry about reactive, reflexive proclamations – bordering on ritual incantations – about the ineffable value of Sunday book reviews, the centrality of book culture, the necessity of print book reviews. It is also worth pointing out that the goads for recent NBCC discussions and petitions should be carefully distinguished – the news about the AJC’s downgrading of its book section is quite another thing than the news from (for example) the Chicago Tribune, where the book section will preserve its allotted space as it moves to Saturday; Elizabeth Taylor has worked long, hard, inventively, and successfully to keep book reviews and book-related discussion thriving in her newspaper and in her town, and she also reminds us that the issue here isn’t simply one of book reviews but rather the state of newspapers tout court. A harsh take on the current situation – a sober realism, from another angle – might yield the following: book reviews are not earning their keep, or are not persuading newspaper publishers that they are earning their keep, and thus if they go, they go the way of the epistolary novel or the feuilleton: fine and important genres that served crucial needs in their time and are now defunct. And besides, as numerous critics have observed, the web seems to be serving interested readers’ needs perfectly well, so that if newspaper book sections fold, well, que será, será.

I don’t agree with this but I want to play devil’s advocate, to sharpen our arguments and to call for a new horizon for making arguments. We need to be making a better case for book reviews and for books per se; or rather, we need to be making several kinds of arguments and offering different kinds of pleasure and challenge. We are giving the game away to number-crunchers, pollsters, and advertising executives. It is time either to meet these folk on their own terms or to make a case for changing the terms. It is striking that most defenders of book reviews and of the literary or civic culture supposedly sustained thereby anchor their defenses in the apparently solid ground of non-fiction: Marie Arana of the Washington Post observed previously on this blog that books on Iraq and on US policy have galvanized discussions of the horrors and malfeasances there. And surely it would be a scandal not to amplify via reviews and other newspaper articles the arguments, evidence, and narratives that nonfiction book authors have mustered in their important, sustained prose works. Daily journalism, crucial though it is especially in a republic that requires informed citizens, works on another temporality; perhaps books are increasingly aspiring to the condition of daily journalism, and this is one reason reviews can seem superfluous – books overly dependent on today’s (or yesterday’s) news are as obsolete as, well, yesterday’s newspaper. Yet books can aim to be both timely and synthetic, and non-fiction works can truly help us “to think what we are doing,” as Hannah Arendt put it in “The Human Condition.”

But this is not the only ground for defending books and by extension the critical mandate of book reviews: we need not hang our hat only on non-fiction urgency, or on Charlie Rose-able (or Rush Limbaugh-able, or Oprah-able) take-away value when assessing books and the conversations books sustain and enrich. We succumb to a diagnostic myopia if we judge everything by its immediate utility, its capacity to intervene in current debate, its serviceability for talking points – whether at cocktail parties, barbecues, or the Council on Foreign Relations. Years ago Ezra Pound suggested that poets were the antennae of the race. I believe this may be so, but I also believe that reviewers can serve more immediately as antennae for us as citizens, alerting us to what is new, and news, but also reminding us what persists -- how artists, writers, soldiers, bankers, and other thinkers are revolving ongoing questions, ideas, problems, and images; how the questions bearing on us now – how to think about terror? Empire? Democracy? Love? Money? How to imagine the future? What to preserve of the past? – are both age-old questions and completely new in our 21st century moment. Book reviews are the sections in newspapers that link the news to a less perishable context; they mediate between datelines and history, and they sponsor men and women who are living and thinking in time, a slower time perhaps than that of summit meetings, bomb scares, mass shootings, and daily deadlines. All the news that is fit to print includes more than the newest news: it includes the latest bulletins from the thoughtful, slowly pondering philosopher, the long-gestating novelist, the classicist who has finally produced her study of Herodotus, the poet who has reworked Horace for an era of decadent democracy, the sex-radical who has thought long and hard about web-porn and ancient bath-houses, the club-kid who has something to tell us about the new hedonism and the new ethics. These discussions should not be left to bi-weekly, estimable reviews: they should be available in city and suburban and rural newspapers, and they should be an index of what used to be, at least in aspiration, an active, unruly, informed and debating populace.

If newspapers cannot provide this perhaps the web will – a thousand micro-communities may yet bloom. Yet civic culture requires a broader, denser net. Who and what will help us weave it? Do we want it? These seem to me to be the questions – and I am interested in your thoughts. Meanwhile, sign the petitions, and more important, read and identify yourself as a reader of those book sections and newspapers you admire.--Maureen N. McLane, NBCC Board Member and Balakian Award Winner

Finding a Voice in Book Reviews

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, a petition, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

OTHER WRITERS in this space have drawn attention to the vital need for newspaper book coverage because of the cultural importance of books--and all of that is true. But I want to mention another reason why it's so important that a self-respecting newspaper should have an abundance of book reviews. And that is the nurturing of reviewers.

At its best, book reviewing is one of the highest forms of cultural criticism. George Orwell, probably the twentieth century's best essayist, got his start reviewing books for a magazine several years before his first book was published; he continued reviewing books all his life, and we read those reviews still today, long after some of the books he reviewed have been forgotten. In his later years, he himself was literary editor of a newspaper, and gave many younger writers a start by commissioning book reviews from them.

For younger writers today, book reviewing for newspapers remains an important way to try your wings as a cultural critic. You learn what your own voice is by the discipline of judging other voices. And you enrich the community of readers by doing so with the guidance of a good editor and enough space to have your say. Personal blogs, unedited Wikipedia entries and MySpace pages are no substitute!

--Adam Hochschild

Do Reviews Determine What You Read?

Today, the New York Times film blog put up a post about how "Spiderman 3" and "Wild Hogs" were successes in spite of getting slammed in reviews. It then asked readers to chip in to say how important reviews are in deciding whether they saw a movie.

On a similar note, with the knowledge that this blog has as many readers inside the industry as outside of it, how important are reviews in helping you decide whether to buy a book? Or for those who don't have to buy books but get them for free, how important are reviews in helping you decide whether to read a book at all?

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In Praise of the LA Times Book Review

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

I recently visited my old elementary school in Evanston, IL. I spoke to second and third graders about writing, including the writing I did in that very building, the series of stories about elves who lived in the drainpipe outside my apartment, the poem about wind, the fable about how the kangaroo got its pouch. As I sat on a small chair in a room where I used to sit as a small girl, I was flooded with memories. The waxy, lukewarm cartons of milk. The thick ropes we would climb in gym. The way my class would sit in a circle on the library floor and scratch each others' backs as the librarian read to us. And book reports. Beloved book reports.

I have been an avid reader since I was three. Books have always been central to my life. Many of my classmates groaned when we were assigned book reports, but I was always happy. Book reports gave me a chance to relive the book I had just enjoyed, to figure out what I appreciated about it. I loved when we had to read our book reports out loud in class, because I could learn what other kids were reading, see what titles sparked my interest. Through these book reports, I had a wider sense of possibility as a reader. I also learned how subjective taste could be—some of the kids in the class hated books I adored; others found nuances that I hadn't considered. I always felt energized, inspired, after book report day, ready to head to the library or ask my parents to buy me a specific title at Krochs and Brentanos.

Now as an adult, book reviews give me a similar window into the world of the word. They expose me to titles I might not have heard of otherwise. They give me a greater pool to swim in as a reader. They provide that same spark I felt as a child, that desire to race to the library or bookstore and grab a new title. It breaks my heart to see book reviews losing pages, column inches, editors, reviewers at an alarming rate. I worry about the fate of my beloved books. If newspapers are losing readers and then those remaining readers are losing vital information about books, how will the printed word continue to be part of our cultural dialog?

I've lived in Southern California for 21 years; the Los Angeles Times Review of Books has been my weekly touchstone here. I am not a very systematic person, but I have a specific Sunday ritual: I have to read the book section before any other section of the paper. It's very superstitious of me, almost a fetish. I imagine that if I don't read the book section first, the book gods will think I'm not taking my writing seriously and will find a way to smite me. Needless to say, I've invested the Los Angeles Times Review of Books with a lot of power.

It upset me greatly to hear that the book section was losing power within the structure of the L.A. Times. I knew the book gods would not be happy. I knew that readers besides myself would not be happy, either. Nor would other writers who worry about finding an audience.

Of course much of the conversation has shifted online. I love reading lit blogs, but I've found that the more time I spend reading online, the less time I spend reading books. With its endless links, online reading just seems to encourage more online reading. Something about reading book reviews on paper makes me want to reach out to books even more, feel their physical heft in my hands.

I have to admit: the new LA Times Review of Books does have its charms. I kind of like how you have to flip it over to read the Opinion section—it reminds me of a choose your own adventure story, or of coloring books I had as a child, where one half was pictures of, say, airplanes, and if you flipped it over, you could color flowers. The section is less diminished than I feared—it still has several pages of substantial reviews. I do miss the event listings, though (it was always a thrill to see my name there), and worried about Susan Salter Reynolds' Discoveries, those lovely succinct book reports (I was glad to see "Discoveries" back in yesterday's section). I miss having a distinct, separate section I could obsess about, a section where I could channel all my hopes and fears as both a writer and a reader. It doesn't feel the same now that the section is sharing real estate.

I do have hope for the future of reading, though. At my old elementary school, the students were so excited about books, so excited about their own writing, so excited to meet someone who has fashioned a life around words. As I was leaving, one little boy raised his hand for a high five, and when I returned it, he turned to his friend, his eyes bright, and said “I touched a real author!” May readers continue to be able to touch real authors through the books that carry the true lifeblood of our culture, and may our culture remember that we need coverage of books to keep that lifeblood circulating.--Gayle Brandeis

The Importance of Dialogue

LAST WEEK, THE NBCC held its first ever bricks and mortar protest in 33 years of existence. With the help of local booksellers in Atlanta, readers, writers, and an enormous organizational push from Shannon Byrne, we staged a read-in at the offices of the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

Why? As had long been expected, the AJC announced a massive reorganization of its entire newsroom, eliminating numerous jobs, from the book editor to many other positions. During lunch hour on Thursday, outside the office of the paper, I talked to a maintenance worker whose department was cut from 52 jobs down to 30. "I've got 26 years experience," he said, "I'm fine. We've got a union. But anyone with less then 10? They're gone."

As anyone who reads a paper today knows, the news industry is changing -- slowly, painfully, and with a wary eye at "new" competition. And as Los Angeles Times Book Review editor David Ulin pointed out last week, at the start of this NBCC campaign to raise awareness about what's happening to the print book review, it's not necessarily that it's the book pages being targeted -- in some cases, it's just their turn.

Still, we're not going to sit back and watch this happen, watch papers cede their cultural authority to forms which provide less to readers, and in so doing undercut their very essential interest -- their civic duty -- of fostering cultural literacy. It seems an abject lack of courage for papers to point to Amazon reviews, as I have heard some editors say, or blogs, and say such 'competition' means the raison d'etre of a book page is threatened. Did talk radio ever threaten the sports page?

And so we went down to Atlanta, gathered up a few bullhorns and books, a few signs and a copy of "The Moviegoer," and made a little noise. Judging by the response to this CNN blog post, or this most recent editorial in the Walton Tribune, we're not alone in being worried about the AJC's ability to cover a field as wide and intense as books without a book editor, let alone one as passionate and experienced as Teresa Weaver. The response to the NBCC's petition has been overwhelming, and to anyone who signed it or passed it on, or just thought about it for a moment -- thank you.

I can also say we are being heard. After two hours of protesting, the AJC sent down a p.r. person and brought myself and Shannon up to a meeting with editor, Julia Wallace, and newly installed managing editor/print, Bert Roughton. For an hour they listened to our concerns, and spoke to us of the wider context for the paper's reorganization. We traded ideas about what book sections are missing, what they can do with new technology, we expressed our doubt that a paper could do as good a job covering books with fewer people to do it, and by the meeting's close, Wallace had promised to send the paper's new features editor, Melissa Turner, who will be overseeing books, to BEA for an NBCC panel on the changing nature of newspapers and how this affects books coverage.

As gracious as they were -- and there's nothing like southern hospitality -- I think the most moving part of the trip last week was talking to people on the street outside the AJC and around Atlanta. There were the usual groups of people who didn't want to be handed a piece of paper on their way to work. But many more stopped and were concerned, and were more than happy to share their opinions of a paper into which they'd like to have some input. I came away feeling that every critic should be required to spend an hour on the street with their work, talking to the strangers who read it. It's inspiring and energizing. It reminds you of one of the essential functions of cultural criticism -- namely, its ability to reach across geographical, cultural, racial and political boundaries to speak from one person to the next in an intimate way.

The AJC has said they will continue books coverage, but in a different form -- with more of a local focus, without a book editor, and with an eye on local stories. We applaud their investment in local coverage, but we remain wary of their ability to do so without a person assigned to the books beat -- every paper which has attempted the same has saw a diminishment of their section. So the NBCC petition to raise awareness about this issue in Atlanta will continue, but in the interest of good faith dialogue with the paper and the people who read it, now is the time to bring forward ideas. Do you have any? We want to know.

There are a lot of questions to think about -- should a paper use wire copy for non-local writers as a way to free up resources to spend money on local coverage? Is something lost when everything outside a region is filtered to you by critics who have no affiliation with a newspaper? What are book sections missing? What features could they add at little cost? Are there ways to bring bookseller, bookclub and reading series sponsor voices into the paper? What design elements might make book sections more appealing to look at? What do international book sections have which American book sections? Should the AJC expand its online content? If so, how?

One of the points this campaign needs to make, without flogging ourselves with it, is that book review sections have to shoulder some blame in cutbacks. There's nothing deadlier than a badly written book review -- or a badly designed book page. If book pages are to become a primary node of outreach into communities for newspapers -- as I think they can be -- they need to be stylish, fun, enticing, up-to-date and well-written. They also have to be defended, which is where the NBCC comes in and which is why we will continue our petition in Atlanta. If the paper is going to make a realistic, far-reaching, informed decision about the future of its book pages, it needs to know how many people read it, care about it, and they need to know what it means to the community.

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Bookseller-Turned-Author Lauren Baratz-Logsted on the Value of Books

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of seven published books for adults and teens including "Vertigo" (Random House), "How Nancy Drew Saved My Life" (Red Dress Ink), and "Angel's Choice" (Simon Pulse). She has worked as a bookseller, a PW reviewer, a freelance editor, a sort-of librarian and a window washer. When NBCC Vice President/Membership Jane Ciabattari checked in recently with Readerville.com , where Lauren was celebrating an offer for the first four books in a children's series to be written with her husband and daughter, and asked for volunteers for the NBCC Campaign to Save Book Reviews and book culture, she responded with this post:

Before I became a published author, I worked for 11 years at Klein’s of Westport, a now-defunct independent bookstore that in its heyday was the largest of its kind in the northeast. One day a woman came into the store with dark Jackie O sunglasses on, but even with the huge shades I could still see the tear tracks staining her cheeks. She told me she didn’t care what I gave her; she just needed a good book. Not knowing what her problems were, but figuring books about death and depression probably wouldn’t do, I gave her a copy of Olive Ann Burns’ delightful novel "Cold Sassy Tree." She didn’t even look at what I was giving her as she handed over the money and I put her purchase in a bag.

She came back the next week. She told me what her problems had been and they were the kind of pile of awful troubles that would knock any feeling person for a loop. Then she told me that I’d saved her life. Maybe she was hyperbolating, but I knew what she was talking about. When the world turns awful, it does feel as though books can save a reading person’s life.

That’s why we need book reviews to expand, not shrink: so that booksellers and consumers can learn about more great books to recommend and read, even if none of those reviews are ever about my books. --Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Crooked River Ain't Burning Yet

Over at the Plain Dealer in Cleveland, book editor Karen Long weighs in on the discussion of print book reviews and has this to say:

"The fact that Winslow, literary editor of The Nation for several years, sounded his cri de coeur in cyberspace carries some extra grit into our eyes. Because even as the National Book Critics Circle gathers signatures and stages a protest in front of the bricks-and-mortar Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a number of bloggers are borderline gleeful, ready to polish their dancing shoes for a nice tap across the graves of old mainstream media.

This, of course, is a false choice. As much as I love The Book Babes - "Two veteran book critics who believe books are better than Botox" - this pair will never be in a position to tell you, as Kathy Englehart did two weeks ago, which children's books to read with your kids before visiting the Monet exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art.”

Long talked to Plain Dealer assistant managing Debbie Van Tassel, and editor Douglas Clifton, both of whom affirmed the paper's continued commitment to books.

”[Clifton] noted the natural affinity between book readers and newspaper readers, a crossover that cultivates both camps. It seems ridiculous that when television is busy affirming books - on "Oprah" and "The Daily Show" and Al Roker's new kids book club - that newspapers should lose their way.”

Atlanta Petition Reaches 5000 Signatures

The NBCC's petition to protest the decision of removing the book editor job at the AJC reached 5,000 online signatures this morning. It has also gone overseas. This week, Erica Wagner has written her column about it in the Times (UK). Thanks to everyone for the support. And if you haven't read it or signed, forwarded to a friend who might care, please have a look. It is making a difference. Stay tuned for future updates on the situation there, and for many more dispatches from writers, booksellers, publishers, bloggers and readers as the NBCC campaign to raise awareness on this issue continues.

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Help the Nice TONY Folks

People: The folks over at Time Out New York are having an online competition to decide the books most essential to New York life (and cocktail conversation). They've got 64 titles, arranged in an NCAA tournament-style bracket, and they want your votes. So get thee to their website. While you're there, check out the

Now Hear This: Pret-a-Poetry

Not-so-brief preamble:

I'm one of those audiophiles who doesn't own an iPod, because I like to rip FLAC files of art songs --especially lieder--and play them full size, rather than purchasing teeny 128 kbps mp3 or aac files that I can only play on one thing. (Didn't understand one word of that? Don't worry--I just wanted to explain for the two people who will care.) The good side: I get those art songs crystal clear. The bad side: Audible doesn't support my player, and if I want to listen to bookish podcasts, I have to get my fix elsewhere.

Luckily--the poetry world isn't totally locked into iTunes yet. (For a group of people who routinely revel in Renaissance poetry forms, I'm actually amazed we're online at all.) So, for your summer strolling pleasure, I've rounded up some great online poetry that even FLAC-fans can enjoy. You can listen to it on your iPod too, of course! (NB: A lot of the links below open directly into audio files--if you're at work, you might want to put on headphones.)

The new(ish) Paris Review has an alphabetized, searchable online audio archive of readings and interviews--on just the first page of the listings, I found poems by Agha Shahid Ali, Billy Collins, and Jim Carroll.

The BBC's interviews with poets--though brief--are an incredible time machine for commentary. Try Auden on music and poetry, or Siegfried Sassoon on tableaux vivants. (!)

Ami Greko at FSG's new poetry blog, The Best Words in Their Best Order, has been doing an unbelievable job assembling great audio links from FSG poets. It's impossible to even begin to list all the good stuff--just go hit the recordings section of the blog, now. (Okay, one thing. I might cry that my cell phone is too cheap--ironic, yes?--to play the Paul Muldoon ringtone.)

Slate has been providing recordings of its authors reading their poems since pretty much the dawn of time. They don't podcast them--For God's Slate! Podcast them!--but here's the archive, plus a link to one of my favorites: Jennifer Clarvoe's "Day of Needs."

The University of Chicago has audio AND video of its reading series online. If you want to guess what Dan Beachy-Quick looks like, then see if you're right, you're all set.

So far FSG's "Best Words" blog seems to be trouncing Houghton Mifflin's "Poetic Voice" in the online poetry sphere (yeech, Houghton! Make it pretty, please!), but Houghton gets points for putting another favorite poet, David Tucker, online.

It would be crazy if Poetry didn't have a great audio archive. It's not huge as of yet, but we especially like the themed bundles, like poems about getting out of the city or parenthood and sleep deprivation.

Hit the Kenyon Review's readings page for Fanny Howe and others.

Quickmuse isn't audio, but it's certainly online only--the readings series pairs authors against each other in live inspiration-battles (for lack of a better phrase), and then Quickmuse posts the poetical creations in real-time online. Have no idea what I'm talking about? Watch Paul Muldoon (yes, it's Paul Muldoon Appreciation Day around here) create "Stranded." (Here's Brad Leithauser's creation from the same reading. We'll have a Leithauser Appreciation Day around here eventually.)

Do you have the link to a great readings thingamabob, podcast what-do-you-call-it, online book thinger, etc.? Please post it below.

Tech tip: A lot of the audio linked above doesn't offer the ability download the MP3 directly. But if you want to listen away from your computer, right-click on the link and choose "Save Target As" or "Save Link As". You can then download the audio file directly to your desktop and take it anywhere.

Speaking of Blogs and News

Denise Low, Poet Laureate of Kansas, notes on her blog, Ad Astra, "I commend the current Kansas City Star book editor John Mark Eberhart, who makes the most of his allotted space to review local writers or at least briefly note their books. He is one of a handful of editors who publishes poetry every Sunday, even before former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser’s syndicated column. Yet I must search through pounds of paper to find the few book pages. In my local newspaper, the Lawrence Journal World, I turn to a section called “Pulse” to find a few reprinted reviews, features about local authors, and, luckily, because of another enlightened arts editor—Mindie Paget—a poem."

The Lawrence Journal World was spawning ground of Adrian Holovaty, editor of editorial innovations at washingtonpost.com, who gave this year's 2007 Hearst New Media Lecturer at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism a few weeks back. This week he launched CampaignTracker, a Django-powered searchable database of 2008 presidential campaign events on the Post website.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post looks at the online political operatives who are running the 2008 presidential candidates' websites, including the legendary Joe Trippi.

Duke Professor Cathy Davidson notes, "We Techies Read Too,"on the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, Technology Advanced Collaboratory or "haystack")blog.

University of Mississippi Professor Samir Husni, known as "Mr Magazine," for his annual updates on magazines, had this to say recently on the shift in the newspaper industry:"That’s why I say newspapers in this country are not dying, they are committing suicide. You go to speak in newspaper newsrooms, I’ve gone to speak about the future of newsrooms, and their first reaction is that ‘You are the anti-christ. You want us to do what? Do more than just go to a board meeting and record it and spit it out? We have to analyze and go beyond that?’ Even the Internet is too late to provide me the information. Whatever happens in the world now I get an alert on my Blackberry. The immediacy of news delivery can no longer be done in a newspaper.

"We have to change the name of a newspaper to daily paper. We have to accept the fact that we have to go beyond the 5 W’s and H [who, when, what, where, why and how] and start talking about ‘what’s in it for me?’ and leave the 5 W’s and H to electronic delivery because we cannot compete with that. Newsweek and Time are like a snapshot in time. Instead of giving you a summary of the news, they need to give you an in-depth analysis on a few topics."

Bill Roorbach on the Literary Landscape

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, a petition protesting recent cutbacks at the AJC, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

May, 1989, and I’m walking into Pat Towers’s office at Seven Days magazine, a New York City weekly now long defunct. I’m having trouble finding her, though the room’s no bigger than a good-size closet. And I’m nervous because she’s giving me a break, assigning me a book to review, and now more nervous because the room is jammed with spines, and Pat’s desk (if there is one) is hidden among thousands of books piled pell-mell, mountains of bound galleys obscuring shelves laden but long obviated.

The secretary has sent me in, I’m shaking in my boots, but Pat’s not there.

Then something in the corner moves: Pat, who blends right into the background, horizontally striped blouse. She’s handing me a little pile of bound galleys, books she's plucked from the avalanche thinking I’ll like them, all based on what she knows about me: books about fishing, ferns, gardens, love, reggae music.

And these books were news -- new thinking on old subjects, new worlds of fiction, whole new galaxies in poetry -- hard news. And newspapers, especially culture weeklies, had an obligation to report on and respond to news. That was clear and everyone knew it -- there was no advertising imperative tacked to this good news, any more than there was to the front-page news (I mean imagine: "Reagan’s been shot? Get advertising to call Remington Rifle Works!").

Pat spent her days culling and gleaning and cherry-picking, looking for the top news in the constant flow of titles -- just like any editor, sorting the news from the dross -- and all to the benefit of her readers, who trusted her to make sense of the maelstrom.

Well, Seven Days died, and not because of books: books are alive and still news. Yet book-review sections like honey bees are dying mysteriously: if books are still news and advertising is not the point and if readers are perforce the most reliable customers of newspapers what's the cause?

And where will our honey come from?

-- Bill Roorbach

A Few Old Fashioned Roundup Links

Board member Mary Ann Gwinn talks with NBCC finalist Terri Jentz about her horrific near-murder experience.

NBCC member Bill Williams looks at the new books by those New Yorker doctor-writers and finds their world demystified, and a bit scary.

The National Review interviews former Balakian winner Thomas Mallon about Kennedy and McCarthy.

Hillel Italie talks politics and poetry with former NBCC winner and finalist Frederick Seidel , who wrote about the Kennedy administration ("We could love politics for its mind!/All seemed possible"), the Bush administration ("The United States of America preemptively eats the world"), and got into all kinds of trouble (a revoked award, a nixed publishing deal) for refusing to delete references to former first lady Eisenhower in one of his books.

And, speaking of poets and first ladies, here's an oldie but goodie: Former NBCC poetry winner Sharon Olds once tore Laura Bush a serious new one.

Around the World on Friday...beginning in Atlanta

Local Fox 5 TV covered the READ IN in Atlanta yesterday, and their story is up here. Creative Loafing, Atlanta's alt-weekly newspaper, checked in on the lay of the land today, too.

Babygotbooks.com has a dispatch from the protest, as did CNN.com's Todd Leopold, prompting 344(!) comments.

Norman Mailer, Yann Martel, Monica Ali and Colm Toibin are the latest signers of the NBCC petition to protest the cutbacks in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, in the New York Review, Hermione Lee thinks about the novel.

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And Now For Something Completely Different: Book Reviewing and the Environment

I got an email a few days ago from NBCC member Hallie Ephron, who said this:

"Every day I get 3-10 books in the mail from publishers hoping for a review in the Boston Globe, and about half of them come in plastic or bubble-wrap envelopes that can't be recycled. I multiply this by however many there are in NBCC and I wonder if I'm the only one who would like to send a message to the publishing houses: please, please, please, send them in paper/cardboard so we can recycle instead of adding to the mess in our landfills."

The answer: No, you're not the only one. That non-recyclable stuff piles up on my doorstep every week too, and I wonder the same thing. What really gets me: Those plastic mailers, with layers and layers of bubble wrap inside them, all protecting a single book. My father sends me books in those little flimsy (totally recyclable) priority mailers all the time, and they survive the trip from west to east coast just fine. But it takes tons of plastic (and often Styrofoam) to send one book a mile or so across town from a publishing house? I would be interested to see someone actually calculate the environmental footprint of sending out review copies -- I bet it's pretty high.

What to do about this? I'm not sure. Send messages to publishing houses saying please, stop that? Post about it on this blog and hope publicists read about it and call meetings to say, Hey, let's nix the crazy packaging? Or, since critics seem to be all about organizing these days, maybe reviewers should start marking those shipments return to sender, this address only accepts recyclable packages ... that might get somebody's attention.

Read-in at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution #6

NBCC President John Freeman, putting in a call to Atlanta Journal-Constitution Editor Julia Wallace at today's protest. Freeman later met with her and discussed concerns about diminishing books coverage in the newspaper. Watch for his report here.

Read-in at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution #5

Another signature added to the petition to save the book review editor's position at the Read-in organized by the NBCC outside offices of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The NBBC's online petition has 4848 names so far, plus the signatures added in Atlanta at bookstores and during the protest. More in this report in PW. And in this afternoon's blog post on Fox News.

Read-in at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution #4

Fox news, CNN, C-span all covered the Read-in. (Cameraman here with NBCC president John Freeman.) This report on CNN.com led to dozens of comments within hours,mostly from people who love books ("I'm a total info junkie, addicted to the net, my cell, DVDs, you name it, but nothing couold ever replace reading as my #1 passion").

Read-in at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution #3

Marc Fitten of the Chattahoochee Review and Ginger Collins of the Atlanta Writer's Club, among the organizers of the Read-In, gathered signatures on petitions on the ground in Atlanta while the NBCC petition was filling up online.

Protest at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution #2

Joshilyn Jackson, author of "gods in Alabama" and "Between, Georgia," and Karen Abbott , whose "Sin in the Second City" is due out in July, reading from their work at the Read-in outside the offices of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Protest at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution #1

NBCC President John Freeman and author Alain de Botton , author of "Proust Can Save Your Life," were in the crowd at this morning's read-in protesting the elimination of the book editor's job at the Atlanta Constitution-Journal.

Joseph Skibell's Plea to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Along with the CNN, C-Span, Fox News cameras, print reporters, independent bookstore owners, authors, readers and critics (including NBCC president John Freeman, who delivered the NBCC's online petition with nearly 5,000 signatures to Atlanta Journal-Constitution editor Julia Wallace), award winning novelist and Emory professor Joseph Skibell was on hand at today's demontration protesting the elimination of the book review editor's position at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He shares his remarks:

The Nazis knew how important books were to a free and liberal society – and that’s why they burned them. The Soviets as well. Not only were books suppressed in Stalinist Russia, but writers were rounded up and shot. The Soviets believed writers were simply too dangerous to the system. You see this again and again. Whenever a despot comes to power, the first people to go are the writers.

In America, however, we silence our writers in another way. We silence them through indifference. We claim that their only function is entertain us, and then we complain that they’re boring. According to the Atlanta Journal Constitution, writing – literature – books – is less important than the crime beat in Marietta or Gwinnett or the Buckhead Society page.

No books are burned, no writers are murdered by the state, but through this great and terrible indifference – through this terrible belittling of the Western Intellectual Tradition – a tradition based upon the importance and primacy of books – based upon the importance of ideas in books – of ideas circulating through books – our basic freedoms are eroded and, in this case, willingly surrendered – and here surrendered by the fifth estate, by the newspapers whose job it is not only to report the news, but to reflect a city back to itself.

If Atlanta is the capital of the New South, is that a south that doesn’t need its books? A south that doesn’t needs its universities? A south that doesn’t need intellectual inquiry and discussion? Is all that only for New York? I don’t think so. A society that denigrates books, is a society that denigrates free thought, and a society that denigrates free thought is a society that ultimately denigrates freedom.

I urge the Atlanta Journal Constitution to reconsider its decision to eliminate its Book Editor. More is at stake than just one talented woman’s job. More is at stake than just the latest reviews of the newest detective novel. Our very sense of who we are is at stake. We can either stand with the Nazis and the Soviets and the Taliban – who destroyed books and burned them and belittled them – or we can stand with the Jeffersons and the Franklins and the Whitmans and the Faulkners who knew that a book – that funny little oblong object – is perhaps all that keeps a society, a city, a nation free.--Joseph Skibell

This Just in from Today's Atlanta Demonstration

Baby Got Books reporting from this morning's demonstration in Atlanta, notes that Tom Key, the king of Atlanta theater and head of The Theatrical Outfit, was reading aloud from "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Moviegoer."

Conversation with Dallas Morning News Editor Bob Mong

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

As editor of The Dallas Morning News, Bob Mong sets the strategic direction of the paper’s news and editorial pages. He recently responded to the following questions about the paper’s recent cutbacks and how book coverage fits into the features package.

Q. Can you summarize how many cuts have been made and where they’re occurred, and the thinking behind them?

A. Like all major metro newspapers, we have reduced the size of our professional news staff and must do more with less. We continue to have the largest and most experienced news and editorial staff in Texas, and from my perspective, in the South. As for space and staff allocation, we are first and foremost a local and regional news and information company. We are best known for our strong investigative and enterprise reporting, for skilled local and state public policy reporting, for excellent border and Mexico reporting, for national-class education coverage, for our sports section, for an outstanding editorial page (and for its imaginative Points commentary section on Sunday), for solid business coverage, for national-class photography and videography, for thoughtful arts and entertainment coverage – to name a few areas of excellence.

Q. How much space and staffing is currently dedicated to book criticism – that is, reviews? How does that compare to a year ago? Five years ago?

A. We devote the same amount of space to book criticism that we did five years ago. The Dallas Morning News covers books in its Sunday arts and entertainment section as well as in its Business section and on its Religion pages on Saturday. We have one fulltime staffer assigned to books; we had two five years ago.

Q. How about space and staffing for book coverage over all?

A. Space for books coverage is comparable to what existed five years ago. Additionally, we have built a strong partnership with the Mayborn Institute at the University of North Texas as a top sponsor of the Mayborn Literary Journalism conference, now in its third season. This brings in outstanding authors to explore the craft of narrative writing. We send many of our staffers to this event, and others on our staff teach at the conference.

Q. Your book editor, Michael Merschel, has incorporated a blog into the paper’s book coverage. What kind of audience does it have? How does it replace or supplement print coverage?

A. Our blog appeals to readers who are passionate about books. One of the benefits of the web is its interactivity, bringing to a large institution like ours the capacity to be smaller and more intimate. I applaud Mike Merschel for developing this blog.

Q. The NBCC has launched a Campaign to Save Reviewing that was spurred in part because of the DMN’s decision to eliminate the post of book critic. From the group’s perspective, this decision seems a curious choice for a newspaper that has covered books conspicuously for the past half-century. How would you describe your paper’s legacy covering books and literature?

A. We have covered books for much longer than 50 years. Katherine Anne Porter’s early books were reviewed in our pages. Lon Tinkle was the voice of book criticism in the Southwest for many years. I intend to be opportunistic in finding first-rate folks to write about books in our pages. One of our most gifted reporters, Michael Granberry, wrote a beautiful appreciation of David Halberstam on the cover of GuideLive this week. This is a dynamic situation, and we are still adjusting to last year’s buyouts. I would encourage you to stay in touch with me on this subject.

Q. Former DMN book critic Jerome Weeks describes Dallas as an “aspirational” city – i.e., one that wants to be a player on the national stage. He argues that the paper is not supplying its readers with book coverage – and, more generally, cultural coverage -- that fits the city’s intellectual ambitions. What’s your response?

A. Debate is the fuel of democracy, and Jerome Weeks can argue with the best of them. I happen to disagree with him. Just look at our outstanding multi-day, front-page display of arts patron Raymond Nasher’s obituary and complementary material. It is emblematic of how we approach a cultural story of that magnitude. Media and pop culture writer Tom Maurstad hosts salons at a local museum on arts topics. I would put Lawson Taitte and Scott Cantrell against anyone’s theater and classical music critics; plus both of them are amazingly versatile. Our cinema critic, Chris Vognar, certainly covers the showier movies but specializes in raising the visibility of less well known movies that often convey more meaning and power. Our popular music critics are very good too.

Q. The NBCC believes book coverage in general and book criticism in particular is an easy target for newspapers that are trying to trim costs. Book coverage doesn’t generate advertising. Is this the primary reason it’s so vulnerable?

A. I consider coverage of books to be essential to our future.--Ellen Heltzel

NBCC and Atlantans Protest Outside the AJC Today

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

WHAT: ATLANTA Save the Book Review READ-IN! Bring a book (or many books!) you love, and let’s create a critical mass of readers to put the pressure on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to reverse its terrible decision to “reorganize” its book review out of existence! They got rid of the book review editor, and without an official champion for books within the paper, the quality of books coverage is endangered! It will become disorganized and sporadic, if not simply perfunctory, until, worse, it’s no longer there.

TIME: 10:00 AM until…you decide!

DATE: TODAY, *rain or shine

LOCATION: Converge in front of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution at 72 Marietta Street. Hold open your book and read aloud or to yourself. Trust me, you won’t be the only one. Picture hundreds of people doing the same thing! [*directions below]

WHO: Open to any and all readers and lovers of books, newspapers and literary discussion. Come one, come all Atlantans (or ATLiens), Georgians, and maybe even some of you hardcore out-of-staters. On hand to say a few words: Atlanta novelists Joshilyn Jackson and Joseph Skibell, bookseller Philip Rafshoon of Outwrite Books, George Weinstein of Atlanta Writers Club, and Shannon Byrne of Little, Brown.

WHY: Because the city of Atlanta wants a robust, reader-friendly, intelligent book review, not just a section run on auto-pilot from above. Teresa Weaver has created and run exactly this kind of section for almost ten years now and we want the AJC to reward her expertise, not eliminate her job. Again, if you haven’t signed the 'Protect Atlanta's Book Review ' petition yet, here’s the link to it: 'Protect Atlanta's Book Review '

DIRECTIONS: MARTA: The MARTA stop is Five Points. Exit onto Marietta St., the AJC building is less than two blocks west (left). For an online Citysearch map, look here.

**

Wednesday Roundup

In today's Poynter column on book critics to the ramparts, Ellen Heltzel writes, "When it made the decision to combine its book section and op-ed pages into a single tab as an economy measure, the Los Angeles Times' book editor managed some artful dodging: The events calendar and the bestseller list were moved to the Web, which is growing as an alternative medium for book editors nationwide. No review space was sacrificed, and no staff was eliminated. The NBCC hopes its call to arms will have a similar effect elsewhere. At the least, it is alerting newspapers and readers that book sections matter.Now the critics' group needs to start another discussion: how to make books and reading more visible everywhere else. Newspapers are not the only outlet that can carry the cultural conversation to a wide audience. Just ask Oprah."

Over at CJRDaily, Gal Beckerman points to the "organic link between books and newspapers."

Meanwhile, hats off to McSweeney's for winning a National Magazine Award in fiction for short stories by T. C. Boyle, Susan Steinberg and Rajesh Parameswaran.

And to Rajiv Chandrasekaran, winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for best nonfiction book on international affairs for "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," published by Knopf. At the awards ceremony, Chandrasekaran joined other awardees who had covered Iraq, including Kimberly Dozier, who accepted the OPC President's award on behalf of 261 journalists killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and 49 injured, and George Packer, honored for "The Lesson of Tal Afar" in the New Yorker, in calling for support for the Iraqis who have put their lives at risk by helping Western journalists report their stories, including the many Iraqi translators and fixers who will be left behind when the U.S. withdraws from Iraq. The OPC is compiling a list of all those wounded and killed in these conflicts. “The names of the correspondents and photographers of major news organizations are usually reported, but the stringers, guides and translators to whom the reporter is indebted, are often missing,” said OPC president Marshall Loeb.“We have tried to provide those missing links."

NBCC Campaign Noted by Motoko Rich

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Writing in today's New York Times, Motoko Rich adds another perspective to the discussion of the future of literary criticism, mentioning many of the worthy literary blogs that add to the national conversation about books.

The National Book Critics Circle board's is an online campaign, conducted on Critical Mass, which was started one year ago as the NBCC board's own literary blog. (Yes, we are litbloggers, too.) Our blogging committee includes Jessa Crispin, John Freeman, David Orr, Jennifer Reese, Rebecca Skloot (our webmaster), Lizzie Skurnick and Eric Miles Wiliamson. We get thousands of unique visitors a day, and are regularly linked to other blogs. The NBCC campaign is based online and discussed by lit-bloggers on Critical Mass and on other blogs throughout the country.

To date the campaign's blog series, launched April 23,has included interviews with and guest posts from George Saunders, Rick Moody, Nadine Gordimer, Roxana Robinson, Richard Ford, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Andrei Codrescu, Catherine Brady, president of the 10,000-member AWP (the AWP has added the NBCC Campaign link to its website, see button at left, made available to all on the Internet), and book editors/executives from newspapers around the country. There's more to come, along with more op eds and blog posts throughout the country (in print and online publications including the Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Poynter, The Guardian).

The NBCC's online petition has more than 4500 signatures as of this morning (just added: Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell, who had this to say:"I'm a British writer who lives in Japan and Ireland but there is only one Republic of Books whose citizens we all are. A newspaper should fortify it, not attack it"). NBCC president John Freeman will be in Atlanta tomorrow to be part of a Save the Book Review Read-in at the Constitution-Journal. (Details here.) And see Atlanta's Fox News report here.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Book Editor Geeta Sharma-Jensen on Podcasting and Other Changes

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

The case for book reviews has never been made as eloquently as it has been by so many on the NBCC blog. My salaams to you all. After reading the Critical Mass posts and talking with book editor friends of mine, I'm beginning to feel a little lonely here in Milwaukee. Am I among those rare book editors whose sections have remained largely intact, who've been able to retain all of their book features--from reviews to roundups to author interviews--as before, in the same place as before, even though the width of their newspaper has shrunk? Surely, besides the Washington Posts and the New York Timeses and such, there are dailies in other large cities that are supporting book review sections like the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is? Of course there are. So, are we in la-la land, deaf to the bell that may be tolling, faintly yet, for us, too?

We know we're not immune. All newspapers are feeling the same pressures - rising newsprint costs, fleeing readers and advertisers, shrinking margins, and executives roving through every section to prune newsprint and staff. Book sections are not the only sections that feel the pain.But they feel it more for a few reasons.

Book pages at most papers our size are non-cash centers. They generate pitiful little money: book publishers don't advertise there; local bookstores can't afford to do much of that either, and the big chains don't seem to be rushing in with advertising dollars. But the expansive real estate is not the only reason book sections get targeted. Let me put in a few good words here for newspaper editors. They are usually not sports-or TV-loving illiterates who don't know the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky or Anita Shreve and Alice Munro. Most of the ones I know are big readers. And some of them even review books. One of our publishers wrote fiction. But top editors are forced to think of re-making the book sections--or moving them, or winnowing them--in part because of a belief that a book section is among the easiest to replace or reconstitute. It's the section that can be easily built with a mixture of wire copy, freelance reviews and a few staff-written pieces--in whichever proportion you choose. It is among the easiest sections to outsource, locally or nationally. (And if you are at six pages, it is also easy to shrink to four without completely sabotaging your book coverage and riling readers.)

Struggling newspapers in these situations usually make the argument that they are not getting rid of books coverage, just folding the stories and reviews about books into the rest of their paper--while reassigning the book editor (who will likely still write about books) or reducing the number of staffers devoted just to books. It seems to me these papers want their book staff to be generalists, writing well about books and authors, sure, but able to fill in on non-book stories as well. And they figure they can use freelance reviewers, just as they've always done, and pluck a few more reviews off the wires.

I hate this McDonald's-izing of book reviews. We're all going to be sounding like everyone else, courtesy of wire services like McClatchy et al and freelance reviewers all over the nation who write for more than one paper. But for the general readers, how much difference does it make? Do they care if Ms. Local Editor writes something about Cormac McCarthy or assigns his latest book for review, or if Mr. Reputation reviews it over in San Francisco or L.A. and then it's recycled in their local paper? Or if Mr. Freelancer writes it for five or six different papers at a time? A story about McCarthy's book is a story about McCarthy's book; someone local doesn't have to write about it. Now, if McCarthy ever came to town, (oh, we wish!) then you bet someone local would write about him.

So, the thinking goes, why not have the general features editor, or an editor by any name, buy freelance pieces, add some wire copy, and then have staffers write stories and reviews for the features section or opinion pages? After all, book sections have for years been buying reviews from freelancers who write for a string of publications. Papers that are struggling could get rid of a staffer or two or three by doing that, not to mention reducing some very expensive newsprint.

Naturally, I don't agree with any of this. I'd argue strenuously that the intellectual health of a community depends on reading and discourse and dialogue and a breath of opinions and ideas. I would argue that the very health of a newspaper depends on readers who read books. And you know what? They'd come right back with the argument that I have laid out above - they're not getting rid of reading and discourse and dialogue and diversity, only folding them into their general coverage of topicsin the community.

The danger here is that if someone doesn't own the books beat, if someone is not dedicated to literary coverage, it might get short shrift. So the NBCC is fighting the good fight in spotlighting the need for literary criticism in a cultured society. But will we be able to sway or change the course of societal and market forces? Who can say. Newspapers also are being squeezed by online publications like Salon and Slate. There are more than 20 good book blogs alone, and they link to book review sections internationally. Even our local book store chain has excellent reviews in its monthly newsletter on the web. I hate to think how many of our readers are getting their book news online. All of which are forcing papers to think differently, to differentiate themselves somehow. Many are turning to local coverage. Marty Kaiser, executive editor at our paper, for instance, is developing a philosophy of competing with other websites and larger newspapers by not competing with them - at least not directly."I think it's most important for newspapers and their websites to provide information that readers can't get anywhere else," he explained."It's forcing us to become more local. Anybody can read the wire--it's community news now. They can read any paper on the web. How do you differentiate yourself if your reviews are the same as those in the New York Times, the same as those you can read online? It means you have to focus on Wisconsin and regional authors, on authors coming here."

So I'm not surprised that my bosses are pressing me to do podcasts and online chats. Ye Gads! I always swore I'd never. But in recent weeks,kicking and whining, I've been led into the sound booth, where they've introduced me to the brave new technological world of books, a world where I have to talk my thoughts into a mic instead of pounding them out on a keyboard. That first time, I would have bolted had my editor not been blocking the exit with his chair. Now, I go meekly to the recording studio. We've had to make other concessions. Our newspaper recently went to a narrower page. We no longer have room for reviews that run longer than 550 words or so.

Still, we've been lucky. Milwaukee is a super book town with book events almost every evening. The city's independent book store chain is one of the oldest and best in the nation. And the Sunday Journal Sentinel has the highest penetration in a metro market--that is, a higher percentage of metro residents subscribe to our Sunday paper than residents in other metro markets in the country. A great many of them are book people. Being locally owned, not being part of a newspaper chain, also makes a difference. Our executives and top editors all know each other and can see and sense how readers respond to books and authors. All four editors up the chain of command from me are literature lovers, and can influence the brass. Then, too, we run lean; there's no bloat. Further, the nearly two pages of book news appear in the arts section, which is supported by movie, restaurant and other entertainment ads.

In the end, our book review pages thrive because of Kaiser's support. Soft spoken and economical with words, he says simply: "I think people who read newspapers read books."I'll do my podcasts, then. But I'll be signing off with these words: "Read it in print!"--Geeta Sharma-Jensen

NPR's "Talk of the Nation" on NBCC Campaign

Newspapers have begun to winnow down their book coverage, and since April 23 we've been devoting blog space to some of the critics, writers and readers who are up in arms over the situation. NBCC president John Freeman explains why some newspapers are eliminating book reviews from their publications on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" this afternoon.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti on the Importance of Book Reviews

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, a petition, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

Q: Book sections are being cut back all across the country. What do you make of this trend -- and what can be done about it?

A: Well, the book media -- especially the book reviews -- are part of what I call the mainstream culture of our civilization, whereas the dominant culture is the military electro-media complex. That's the dominant civilization. But ours is the mainstream culture, and the book review is one of the most important parts of that culture. The mainstream culture is the writers, the critics, the artists, the librarians and everyone else in the intellectual and art worlds, not to mention all the institutions which support it: the universities, the libraries. Without the book reviews, one very large feature of the mainstream culture is gone to be missing,

Q: You told me once your recent book, Americus, I, got one – or maybe even zero reviews – and that even Coney Island of the Mind didn’t get any. Why do you think book review sections miss books like this, and how can they do a better job of not missing them?

A: I don’t know how they’re going to do a better job of reviewing poetry except to review more of it! The trouble is book critics tend to be victims of the dominant culture, which values bestsellers and money more then literary writing. Book critics are victims of that same complex.

Q: What do you think the function of book reviews are – and how do they serve it differently than, say, a blog or an avid book store clerk?

A: Well bloggers are coming up in the world. If the blog culture can reach a high enough intellectual level it could be the most important media in the country for literary people. And the average book store clerk these days is the bookstore clerk in the chain bookstores. My personal experience is if the book isn’t on the computer, the clerk doesn’t have anything to say about that book – except in the independent bookstores.

We don’t like to call them clerks in City Lights -- by the way -- we call them book people, or book men and women. I find in independent bookstore book people will know a great deal about the book. We had Philip Lamantia, the surrealist poet, working at City Lights for a time and some innocent customer would ask about a certain book and he’d give them a half hour lecture on the whole genre or movement of surrealism. Half an hour later the customer would stagger to the counter with a whole armful of books on surrealism and a bewildered look.

Q: You have a Ph.D., but obviously steered clear of the academic life for that of an artist. But you have moonlighted for a while as a reviewer. Why didn’t you stay in it?

A: Before we founded City Lights I was a book reviewer under the editorship of Joseph Henry Jackson, who was one of the old time literary editors the likes of which doesn’t exist anymore. And I reviewed for him for maybe 3 years, but then when we opened city lights, he told me that since I was now an interested party that I was no longer objective and couldn’t be a book reviewer – that’s what you call having a strict moral and ethical view of a book reviewer.

And then later just before the San Francisco Chronicle was bought by the Examiner, I had a column when I was poet laureate of San Francisco -- it was in the Sunday Chronicle called ‘Poetry as News,’ and I can’t think of anything particular I learned about readers of books from that -- as you know you can have a column and get very little feedback. Unless you write a column that is radical enough to get by the editor, which doesn’t happen very often.

Q: San Francisco – or at least your part of it – seems to have a certain immunity from these dour literary trends. Vesuvio’s and City Lights have survived. Is there a lesson here that our book sections could learn?

A: It’s true, there are bars around City Lights like Vesuvio's and Specs' and Café Trieste, which started two years after City Lights started in 1953 – these are still going strong, and they’re unchanged. As for the bookstore, there are no big buildings around us big enough for a chain bookstore. Also Telegraph Hill Dwellers Association has banned any chain bookstores in North Beach, so has the North Beach Merchants Association – there are no chain stores of any kind. There is one hardware store that might be a chain, and it’s Chinese and it snuck in as an independent, I think. It did drive out the local hardware.

Q: What do you see in the future – do you think this trend, what some critics are calling a d decline in book culture, can be beaten back?

A: Well, I think it’ll stop of its own because people predicted the end of the book – people said that the end of the printed book was in sight because it will all be on television, it will all be on CDs, it will all be on electronic media, there will be audio, you can listen to it as you’re traveling in its car. But this trend will die of its own limitations – people just don't feel like reading a book from the computer screen, even thought they can take a computer to bed with them, it's not the same as holding a book. It's a great aesthetic that many millions of people share -- which is the feel of holding a book, as anyone book lover will tell you, the whole sensual experience of it -- to hold a book in your hands. Holding an electronic device is not the same.

Q: What about printed book reviews – do you see them going away?

A: Oh no, they are very important I was down at Book Expo in LA seven years ago and the Chronicle’s book section had just been closed down. And the editor of the LA Times, the book editor, was bewailing it, and he said there are only two book reviews in the country – The New York Times, the LA Times, and maybe one in Chicago. Well Narda Zachino was on stage, and she was then a senior editor at the LA Times and she was on stage while the book editor was saying all this and she said, ‘Stop kvetching,’ and within a couple years she had transferred to become a top editor on the San Francisco Chronicle and she reinstituted the book review in the San Francisco Chronicle and it’s still there and it’s a really important book section, in fact at a quite high level.

Q: It's a great section, but it faced cutbacks again, too. It did just go from eight pages to four.

A: Yeah, well, I don’t understand why the Book Review section here doesn’t get more NYC publishers ads. I don’t think enough pressure has been put on them for the Chronicle. New York publishers should go all out to support the Book Review in San Francisco because it’s an invaluable tool for the publishing trade. If there were no book review sections in the country and the print media, publishers would be at a great disadvantage.

**

Remembering Ryszard Kapuscinski

Friends and admirers of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish wire service reporter turned literary genius who died in January, gathered Sunday at the New York Public Library to toast him with a bottle of vodka provided by Philip Gourevich of the Paris Review, all part of PEN's World Voices Festival. (The panel made a point of finishing the bottle, signalling there was not a KGB agent in the lot.)

Photographs of and by Kapuscinski played against the walls, as did scenes from Gabrielle Pfeiffer's documentary, "A Poet on the Frontline: The Reportage of Ryszard Kapuscinski." The afternoon ended with a haunting sequence of Kapuscinski revisiting his hometown of Pinsk after decades, standing on the frozen river, tracing a map of the world in the snow with his boot and describing how it is possible for a boy from a landlocked town to intuit and illuminate the global realm we now inhabit. "Here's Pinsk. Here's New York. If we have enough will, if we have imagination...."

The anecdotes were by turn harrowing and hilarious.

Werner Herzog called each gray hair he got on his head a "cinski," he noted in a written tribute read by Paul Holdengraber, program director at Live from the NYPL. The reason? Kapuscinski, who was the sole foreign correspondent for the Polish press covering Africa, had been thrown in prison forty times and sentenced to death four times during a time of tribal strife. And what was his worst experience? Herzog asked. Once he was locked up in an old dungeon and drunken soldiers kept throwing poisonous snakes in his cell, Kapuscinski said. Within a week, his hair turned white.

Herzog mentioned that the two shared similar sensibilities, and had once considered doing a science fiction film together with no projections into the future--a science fiction in reverse where most of the technological abilities and our knowledge were lost.

Salman Rushdie recalled attending a performance of play based on "The Emperor," at the Royal Court. (Kapuscinski was able to get "The Emperor," his lacerating account of the last Ethiopian king, Haile Selassie, published in his native Poland in the late 1970s by putting it out in serial form, passing the censors in a titillating display of malicious obedience; to his readers there the book was about the corruption of absolute power in Poland writ large.)

The stage version of "The Emperor," Rushdie said, "led to one of the most surrealistic political demonstrations I've ever seen. Speaking as someone whose work has occasionally led to protest, I am a connoisseur of the form." Half of the protestors in Sloane Square were cigar-smoking, Savile Row suit-wearing Ethiopian monarchists (Selassie was their king); the other half, ganja-smoking dreadlocked Rastafarians (Selassie was their god).

In "The Soccer War," Kapuscinski writes of heading into the war zone in 1966 during the Nigerian civil war:"I was driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive." How do you do it? Rushdie had once asked him. "I make myself unimportant. I make myself seem not worthy of the bullet to kill me. Kill somebody who matters..." As a result, Rushdie said, "He lived to tell the tale."

Carolin Emcke spoke of Kapuscinski the mensch, embodiment of Brecht's "good people, " a generous and thoughtful mentor to a young journalist. Breyten Breytenbach recalled his "self-effacement, courtliness, his greath warmth, his great culture--the poet, the photographer."

Kapuscinski's long-time editor, Adam Michnik of Gazeta Wyborcza, the first independent Polish daily, compared him to Joseph Conrad, and pointed out that Kapuscinski always identified with the poor and excluded of the world. "He rebelled against privilege. Writing about a postcolonial country, he also saw Poland."

Four days before he died, Michnik said, he visited Kapuscinski in the hospital. "He asked what was going on in Polish politics. I didn't want to tell him." Instead, Michnik offered two jokes from the Soviet era:

I

On Red Square,a man is passing out leaflets. He gets grabbed by the KGB. They search him and see that the leaflets are blank.

"Why were you distributing these blank leaflets?!" they demand.

"There's nothing to write," he says. "Everything's clear."

II

A man faints in the streets. When he comes to, he is in an ambulance.

"Where are you taking me?" he asks.

"To the morgue."

"But I'm still alive."

"We haven't gotten there yet."


By the time Philip Gourevitch, no slouch of a foreign correspondent/author himself, came to the podium, the vodka bottle was empty. Gourevitch talked of Kapuscinski the working reporter who covered twenty-seven revolutions and coups, going to places of great danger. "He was a wire service man. Every day he wrote wire service copy." (Kapuscinski himself once described press agency writers as "these anonymous markers of events, these terrible victims of information, working day and night in the worst of all possible conditions.") But, Gourevitch concluded, Kapuscinski was "ultimately a memoirist. He wrote about himself as a character, but, like Primo Levi, as a Chaplinesque figure, as a prose poet of great disorientation.... He was a kind of surrealist. He had an incredibly fine-tuned sense of the absurd. And a great sense of humor."


"Imagine getting 'The Emperor' through the censors in 1978 in Poland," said NBCC award winner in criticism Ren Weschler, a curator of the tribute. He reminisced about Kapuscinski's time as a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities (when Kapuscinski touted Herodotus, Susan Sontag reprimanded him: "It's Thucydides you should care about").

"What brilliance was that," Rushdie said during his time at the podium. "What a profoundly seeing and antic imagination we have lost."

But the stroke of brilliance in the afternoon's mix was to bring in the electrifying Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska to read extensively from the work, reminding us of Kapuscinski's inimitable voice, the ironic intimate storytelling voice he gave us.

Writing of the revolution in Ethiopia in "The Emperor, "All the houses were watching each other, smelling each other, sniffing each other out. This is civil war."

And of the standoff between the policeman and the man in the crowd in 1978 Teheran in "Shah of Shahs": "The man has stopped being afraid. And this is precisely the beginning of the revolution."

And in "Travels with Herodotus," due in English translation in June, this distillation of the ancient world into a line: "A bright Arcadia which every few years overflows with blood."

Yes. All we need to do is read the books--"The Emperor," "Imperium," "Shah of Shahs," "Another Day of Life," "The Soccer Wars," "Travels with Herodotus"--to know.

We have not lost Kapuscinski.

San Francisco Chronicle Book Editor Oscar Villalon on Status of the Book Review

The National Book Critics Circle has launched a Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. This post is part of the campaign's blog series, which features posts by concerned writers, op-eds, Q and As, and tips about how you can get involved to make sure those same owners and editors know that book sections and book culture matter.

In 2001, in the wake of the Hearst Corporation buying the San Francisco Chronicle, an arrangement made all the more difficult by the drying up of newspaper classified ads, not to mention the evaporation of money that was once spilling over from the dot-com boom, the Chronicle decided to make some changes. One of its actions was to tuck the Sunday Book Review into the Sunday Datebook section — and then to reduce it from 12 tabloid pages to six.

When this new Book Review debuted on April 29, readers complained in numbers that, frankly, were unanticipated. The sustained deluge of complaints — delivered by phone, mail, e-mail, even in person — led to the paper reversing itself. On October 7, the Book Review returned, this time as a six-page broadsheet section, and as a separate — that is, stand-alone — section.

This should be considered a success story, one proving newspapers will heed their readers if they complain in large enough numbers. If enough people grumble, they will bring back your favorite comic strip. They will even restore a book review.

Six years later, it saddens me to write that I don’t believe — though I very much hope to be proven wrong — newspapers are likely to reverse their actions, as my paper did in 2001.

There are two major and related reasons for this. One, there’s little incentive for papers to restore pages to sections when it’s likely that in less than a decade newspapers may be existing solely online. And two, the business practices of the ‘90s are finally exacting their toll. Market expectations must be met, profits must be increased, and debt from all sorts of mergers and acquisition has yet to be paid off. So staffers are being laid off, sections slashed, ads are even running on the front page. Meanwhile, remaining editors and writers are overworked and demoralized. Readers are as ravenous for good journalism and excellent writing as ever before, but they read it for free. And nobody who runs a paper is sure how to make enough money off a medium — the Internet — that’s supposed to be their future, but which only makes up five percent of revenue.

It’s a revenue share that keeps growing every year, but it’s not certain how long the owners of newspapers are willing to tolerate little, no or declining profits till somebody figures out a way of making the Internet pay on a scale commensurate with its popularity. This is not to mention the problem of all these cuts affecting the quality of journalism available. Nobody knows if, as the scope and professionalism of journalism declines, newspaper Web sites will be frequented less and less, even if the content is free. Amid this quiet but widespread panic in our industry, the fate of book review sections isn’t sounding the loudest alarm.

So then, what can we do about getting newspapers to save their book reviews? I don’t know. Because first the question “What can newspapers do to save themselves?” has to be answered.--Oscar Villalon