Every Effort Helps

An email message sent to the listserv of the Association of American University Presses by its current president, Sanford G. Thatcher, encourages AAUP members to contact newspaper editors to try to persuade them to publish reviews by local writers, rather than just using syndicated material.

The AAUP (which, as the result of an unfortunate crisis in the acronym-manufacturing industry some years ago, must constantly remind people that it is not the same organization as the American Association of University Professors) represents 125 presses in the United States and abroad. The days when academic books were marketed primarily to academic libraries are long since over. Between the corporate consolidation of trade publishing and the never-ending budget pressures on scholarly presses over the past decade or so, the catalogs of AAUP members now often include numerous titles meant for the general public.

In short, the university-press world now has good reason to pay attention to how newspapers cover books, or don't. In his note to AAUPers, Thatcher, who is also director of Penn State University Press, has taken the initiative by encouraging his colleagues to write for the Centre Daily Times.

Here is the main part of Thatcher's message, quoted by permission:

At a seminar at Penn State last November on journalism and the future of the arts, I was on a panel to talk about book reviewing, and the editor of the CDT was on the panel also. His presentation illuminated the many financial pressures under which newspapers are operating today, which have led them to eliminate staff to which the job of being book review editor could be assigned. We talked afterward, and out of this grew the idea of having book reviews contributed by members of the local community rather than relying on reviews from syndicates written by people located elsewhere. One book reviewed recently, for example, concerned how local public libraries are faring these days, and it would have made perfect sense to have this reviewed by a local librarian; instead, the CDT picked up a review written by someone from Texas!

I am starting off as the coordinator. The CDT has given us a limit of 600 words for a review, but in addition it will print a scan of the book cover if we can provide it. My review of Jacob Hacker's book, The Great Risk Shift, published by Oxford University Press in 2006 and released in an expanded and updated edition in paperback in December 2007, was printed in today's paper.

Accompanying the review in a sidebar (which doesn't show up online) is this message headlined "Be a Reviewer": "If you are interested in writing a review of a recently published book, fiction or nonfiction, that you think members of our local community would appreciate knowing about, please send a brief note to Sanford G. Thatcher, Director, Penn State University Press, at sgt3@psu.edu. Include the title, author, and a brief description of the book and tell why you would like to review it for the Centre Daily Times."

We already have a second review lined up of a new novel by Brandeis professor of literature Edward Engelberg about a scandal involving a university professor in a college town. Our retired humanities editor, Philip Winsor, is writing this review. Our Sales & Marketing Director, Tony Sanfilippo, has recently agreed to write a review of Yale's new book by Jonathan Zittrain titled The Future of the Internet--And How To Stop It. I also recently asked Chicago to send me its new book about Richard Rorty, which I plan to review myself (having been both a former student and the editor of his best known book). I have approached a number of faculty on campus, like Michael Berube, to help with this effort.

It seems to me that there is likely to be no better market for the general-interest titles that we all publish from time to time than the college towns in which many of our presses are located, and if we all were to organize ourselves in such a fashion as to help our local newspapers run reviews of these books written by people in our own communities, we can thereby help offset at least some of the damage done by the disappearance of reviews from the major city dailies. Naturally, I have an interest in this idea's catching on elsewhere because I feel a conflict of interest in having any of our Penn State Press books reviewed by the CDT, at least while I'm serving as coordinator. So I hope some of you will piggyback on our effort and get in touch with your own local paper's editor to see if there might be interest in creating such a "user-generated" book review operation in your community. Our CDT editor is really keen about this initiative, and I wouldn't be surprised if editors elsewhere would echo that sentiment.

Not coincidentally, the theme of my address as departing AAUP president in June will be self-help as a strategy for university presses!

For the record, it's worth mentioning that former NBCC president John Freeman urged academics to take just this sort of initiative last year.

Another encouraging sign has been the decision by The Austin-American Statesman to devote a regular column by Roger Gathman, a local critic, to recent books from academic presses.

Locating the Book Review Section: Dallas

In response to Scott McLemee's Wednewsday post, NBCC member Jerome Weeks aka BookDaddy sent this report on the changes in the book pages of the Dallas Morning News during his time there:

Ten years ago, the Dallas Morning News' book pages were in the back of the week-in-review editorial section (now called "Points"). I always thought we seemed odd there, partly because, as the book columnist, I was on the arts staff, and my author interviews and publishing industry stories appeared in the arts pages. Yet on Sunday, I was permitted to put on my church clothes and sit in the back of the bus behind all of the paper's Big Brain Conservative Solons and Earnest Chin-Scratchers pondering the well-being of humanity and the fortunes of the Republic. I frequently felt like the idiot comic relief, cap-and-bells, joy buzzer, irreverent seltzer spray and all.

What's more, because there was relatively little coordination between the two departments, I often wondered what might happen when one of the paper's Sabbath gas bags (to borrow Calvin Trillin's phrase) would opine favorably on an Important Volume of Political Lore, and in the back pages, I'd hoot at such drivel. Actually, in the course of writing about various books, I often did take shots, in general, at the editors' deeply held faith in free market cure-alls. Nothing much happened, although my departure from the paper 18 months did get a few cheers from local conservative bloggers. Being appreciated and understood is always touching for a critic.

Four years ago, the News' sections were re-jiggered and the arts pages were beefed up. In a newspaper, how and why certain pages and sections appear where they do, when they do, can be a fiendishly complicated and costly matter involving computerized press run capacity. At any rate, the book pages made the long trek to the back of the Sunday arts section, a prison break I'd advocated for years.

But I soon discovered a serious downside: For many people, the arts section is a garish ghetto, something to be avoided or zipped through only for salacious Britney bits (thus confirming their opinion of cultural coverage as light entertainment at best, cheap shilling at worst). I had joined my peers in the culture trade -- in there with The Celebrity Apprentice and The Hills Have Eyes, Part II. When I was with the editorial columnists, even though it seemed I was waving from the back row of the senior class, many readers felt this treated books in the Wood-Paneled Manner they deserve, especially if we kept writing about, sigh, political non-fiction and presidential biographies. Call it the Sam Tanenhaus Halo Effect, but it's an age-old American attitude: Fiction is suspect; non-fiction is useful, educational, improving. Over the years, I even met a number of readers who asked me what hat happened to me -- they'd always read my column and then it had disappeared.

Soooo ... there's something to be said for either placement. In Newspaper World -- where hard news and political insider baseball are considered the highest forms of thought -- putting the book pages with the Big Boys means they're being taken seriously, more or less. Keeping books with my fellow clowns and courtesans in cultural coverage, on the other hand, means we can speak to our people directly, comfortably, without having to do the high school principal act ("Read this, it's good for you"). But it can also mean, in the eyes of many, that we've been trivialized. Of course, the logical solution -- a separate Sunday book section -- now mostly belongs to history.--Jerome Weeks

NBCC at AWP: Jabari Asim on the Black Critical Tradition

Former NBCC VP Jabari Asim, author of "The N Word," former deputy book editor of The Washington Post and current editor in chief of Crisis magazine, a preeminent journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by W.E.B. Du Bois in 1910, had this to say on the NBCC panel on the transition in literary criticism at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) panel February 1.

Before the Kerner Commission on Civil Disorders issued a report in 1968 that led to a new and more colorful kind of newsroom, most African American authors pinned their hopes on being reviewed in such newspapers as the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Daily Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American, and in large-circulation black magazines such as the Crisis, Opportunity, Messenger and, later, Negro Digest. They also found attentive audiences, hospitable forums and valuable feedback in New Masses, The Nation, The New Challenge and other politically oriented periodicals. It was in such pages that black America’s literati sparred, cogitated and in some cases, bloviated. In the process, generations of astute critics rose and helped give voice to the authors clamoring up from Harlem, Natchez, St. Louis and Oklahoma. These important critical voices included George Schuyler, Hubert Harrison, Saunders Redding, Sterling Brown and Margaret Walker.

“The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” a groundbreaking essay by Langston Hughes, first appeared in The Nation in 1926. W.E.B. DuBois’ “Criteria of Negro Art” appeared the same year in The Crisis. Richard Wright’s calculating and provocative “Blueprint for Negro Writing” appeared in 1937 in New Challenge. The mainstream media, as we now call them, were frequently years if not decades behind such out-of-the-way but deeply committed journals. If not for the alternative and minority press, much of the African American literary output of the first half of the twentieth century would have been consigned to a fate comparable to that of Ralph Ellison’s immortal protagonist: it would have been invisible.

My personal discovery of the black critical tradition began in the library in college. I was shocked and awed by Hoyt Fuller’s “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in which he dismantled the poet Louis Simpson’s 1963 review of Gwendolyn Brooks in the New York Herald Tribune Book Week. Simpson wrote, in part, Brooks’ Selected Poems “contains some lively pictures of Negro life.” He went on to assert, “I am not sure it is possible for a Negro to write well without making us aware he is a Negro. On the other hand, if being a Negro is the only subject, the writing is not important.” Then I went backward to Margaret Walker, whose less-than-charitable and not entirely accurate assessment of the Harlem Renaissance noted, drily, “in the final analysis the audience and the significant critics were white.” I kept going until I reached Alain Locke’s seminal essay, “the New Negro.” “The day of aunties, uncles and mammies is gone,” he declared. “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on.” I was hooked.

It’s probably no exaggeration to say that I manage to reflect on the fate of the African American writer on a daily basis. For twenty years it has been both my avocation and my occupation. I published my first book review in an African-American weekly, a piece on the great poet and fiction writer Henry Dumas, gunned down by New York subway police in 1968 in a case of mistaken identity. Goodbye Sweetwater gathered his short fiction in a single volume. During my four years as book editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, followed by 11 years at the Washington Post Book World, I’ve tried to keep close watch on developments in black writing while providing opportunities for African-American reviewers to show off their critical chops. I tried to make sure that no one could say what Margaret Walker charged so long ago: “in the final analysis the audience and the significant critics were white.”

Now, in some respects, I’m back where I started from: an African-American publication. Such magazines and newspapers are no longer reliable sites of great critical reportage. The Messenger and Opportunity are long gone, and just this week the Chicago Defender announced that will no longer be a daily. Effective Feb. 13, it will move to weekly publication. At the Crisis, we face the same pressures everyone else is wrestling with, including declining ad revenues and the challenge of slicing a smaller pie into increasingly slender wedges. Some publicists with whom I’ve had long professional relationships send me books in the same quantities as they did when I was at the Post, but I’m forced to be even more selective, brutally so. When I was at the Post, I shared my colleagues’ misery stemming from our inability to assign every book we thought deserved attention. Multiply that misery about 50-fold and you’ll have some idea of what it’s like at the Crisis.

I’ve edited two issues since coming aboard in August. In my first issue, I published three reviews, including works by August Wilson, a critical study of Ida B. Wells and a novel by Chris Abani. The next issue I gave the entire review space over to an essay commemorating the 50th anniversary of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I ran a strip alongside the essay, briefly noting an additional five books, and I also ran a fine feature on commercial versus literary fiction by Eisa Ulen, who presented here today. I wanted to do more but it wasn’t possible.

Our singular, significant blessing is a solid readership of 250,000—and that’s not counting newsstand sales. So far our readers have not suggested that we alter our traditional approach to cultural coverage, which involves focusing on writers and artists of accomplishment without regard for market trends and commercial status. Our informed and passionate subscribers both encourage us and remind us of a fact persuasively expressed by the great critic Sterling Brown back in 1939. Writing in Opportunity, he argued, “Without great audiences we cannot have great literature.”

At Crisis, we’re determined to hold onto the former while doing all we can to advance the latter.--Jabari Asim

Goodbye to Frank Wilson

ONE OF THE THINGS I have dreaded most about the recent cutbacks in newspapers around America is the fact that many of the people I work with – in some cases, the very best of them – have an option to leave. It’s remarkable how few opted not to opt out. Morale is in the cellar, papers are being attacked from all sides, and inside this storm editors are made to beg for fewer and fewer resources to create a quality ‘news product.’ (Yes, those are the words used these days).

A number of creative souls have done a lot with a little, but there is no magician quite so nimble with his fingers as Frank Wilson, the book editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Earlier this week I learned that Frank finally decided to hang up his hat, and I cannot think of someone in the inky arts who deserves a long and restful golden retirement quite so much. In the past year, in the middle of several buyouts, cutbacks, and near constant talk about making less with more, he managed to squeeze reviews of over 400 books into the paper, giving the Inquirer – which is the eighth largest paper in the country – a first rate book page.

I’ve been writing for the paper for about eight years now, and Frank is my third editor in that time. He was the first to take the hot potato and run with it. Long before any newspaper outside the Guardian had twigged to the online world, Frank set up his own book blog and began running podcasts and guest posts, directing readers to reviews that were running that weekend, keeping tabs on literary debates and throwing up links to stories far outside the borders of Delaware County. That he did this on his own spare time tells you what kind of guy Frank is.

It wasn’t just Frank’s mindfulness of the future that made his section an inspiration, though. He began covering poetry in a serious way, started working creatively with local events (you can actually see him in an NBCC event later this month), and took for granted that the readers of his section cared about ideas. He brought in reviewers like Scott Esposito and M.A. Orthofer and Kate Haegele who have a point of view and unique and informed tastes. He covered genre literature seriously. He also put a hand out to young reviewers, something more and more of our sections need to do in order to stay fresh. It’s embarrassing to say that these things are out of the norm.

That the man at the helm of all this whirling, energetic D.I.Y section was a Jesuit-taught, Kerouac-schooled, nattily dressed fellow entering his silver years with a grumpy streak and distinct conservative leanings disproved all the dichotomies that are so breezily batted around when people talk about literary coverage. By example Frank showed that there was potential in this truly disastrous loss, if we were creative. And that you needn’t be coming from the ‘online world’ to be part of it. That with a little pizzazz and a sense of humor these cutbacks might be weathered and then maybe even reversed.

I will miss working with Frank quite a bit. Although we disagreed on many things, he was the type of editor who made that seem like a plaudit to you both – the sign of independent thinking. He is funny and warm, a great virtual host. For a man working in what is by all accounts extenuating circumstances, he did almost no complaining. I sensed he felt the real thing – the only thing – was out there, coming to his desk, in jiffy packs (surely by the hundreds). I gather in coming days he’ll follow Seamus Heaney – or Major Jackson, that son of Philadelphia – back to his garden, where he’ll be beating back weeds, not budget cuts. That chokecherry should watch out. I mean the most respect when I quote Heaney: By God, the old man could handle a spade.

New Orleans Times-Picayune Book Pages Update

New Orleans Times Picayune book editor and NBCC member Susan Larson sends this update on the changes in her newspaper's book pages as reported in our December 30 post:

There's been a minor glitch in the debut of "The Reading Life," which will now make its debut next Wednesday, which will in future be its regular day. Wednesday was regarded internally as a better day for the section for strategic reasons. We'll have announcements on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and on Wednesday, watch for our first section--which will include a large package about New Orleans reading groups, the introduction of our movers and shakers column, as well a weekly books-in-store feature, and the return of the New York Times bestseller list, which will be the first in a rotating series of lists in the future. In addition, readers will be seeing a larger presence for books on our Web site, nola.com. The Times-Picayune stands by its commitment to book coverage--with our long history of fine writing, our lively literary culture, and the continued post-Katrina focus on our area, we have even more to write about!

Steve Weinberg to Teresa Budasi of the Chicago Sun Times: "Hang in there..."

On the last day of 2007, my postal carrier delivered an envelope from Teresa Budasi, book section editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. Teresa had enclosed the Sunday, Dec. 23 book pages, with a sticky note containing three handwritten words: "Last big section."

Earlier in the year, Teresa had informed me and her other freelance reviewers that the book section would be reduced in size and scope. What a shame, because the "big section" contained so much wonderful material every Sunday.

Here is what greeted readers on Dec. 23, on five broadsheet pages:

*Brief accounts by dozens of Sun-Times reviewers of the best books they read during the year.

*Stand-alone reviews of six disparate books

*A question and answer column with an author

*A feature about holiday books for children

*A do-it-yourself column about self-publishing

*Budasi's story about a book-related board game

*Budasi's column, with a Dr. Seuss theme, about the section's downsizing. The headline said "How the Grinch Stole the Books Section."

Hang in there, Teresa. Please.

--NBCC board member Steve Weinberg
Note: Steve Weinberg is the author of the invaluable and annually updated "Publishing Your Writing about Books and Authors: The National Book Critics Circle Guide to Freelancing," which is available to NBCC members only. His book "Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller," is due out in March 2008.

In Other News

The New Republic has done an issue on books, worth checking out. It features an editorial by the editors which concludes with a few sentences that ought to be faxed out to newspaper owners at the start of each fiscal quarter:

"The responsible and lively and ambitious coverage of books may not be much of a revenue stream, but it is a formidable thought stream, and knowledge stream; and it should be an honor to preside over it. When a book review is done well, it transcends leisure. It inducts its reader into the enchanted circle of those who really live by their minds. It is a small but significant aid to genuine citizenship, to meaningful living."

There's also a review of Gail Pool's book on reviewing by James Wolcott, which is very thorough, contains numerous arrows back to pieces by the great Wilfred Sheed (pictured above), and includes this hopeful reminder of what book reviewing can be:

"You wouldn't divine from this landscape survey of the literary flatlands the thunder and illumination of which book reviews are capable when the right reviewer and the right book meet head-on. Book reviews at full billow can become cultural events: acts of exaltation (Mary McCarthy on Pale Fire), social advocacy (Dwight Macdonald on Michael Harrington's The Other America), reassessment (Brigid Brophy on Franoise Sagan), wrecking-ball demolitions (Macdonald on James Gould Cozzens's By Love Possessed, Sheed on Norman Podhoretz's Making It, Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Alfred Chester on John Rechy's City of Night, Pauline Kael on Mailer's Marilyn, Dale Peck's Sweeney Todd exploits in these pages), reconstructive character surgery (Clive James on Zachary Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis in the Times Literary Supplement), and literary resurrection (Gore Vidal on Dawn Powell). Why not reach for the stars?"

Over in England, Dinaw Mengestu's mournful and exquisitely poised debut novel, "Children of the Revolution," has won the Guardian First Book Prize.

Alexander Yurkowsky on Philip Whalen's "Collected Poems."

NBCC member Joshua Cohen recently reappraised Viktor Shklovsky and Emuna Elon's “If You Awaken Love,” "a serious and insistently dark comedy of politico-religious matters and manners."

Louis Menand on why we read diaries.

Charles Simic might make you want to eat with your hands.

Jon Sack sexes up the history of Iraqi Oil, says the Daily Star.

Publishers to Honor National Book Critics Circle

More good news for the NBCC. This just in from the Association of American Publishers (AAP):

Washington, DC, December 5, 2007: The U.S. publishing industry will pay formal tribute to the National Book Critics Circle for its unique role in the nation’s literary life, according to an announcement today by the Association of American Publishers (AAP). The NBCC has been named to receive the 2008 AAP Honors, an award given annually to individuals and institutions outside the publishing industry for significant achievements in promoting American books and authors. The AAP Honors will be presented to NBCC President John Freeman during the Association’s Annual Meeting in New York on March 5, 2008.

Founded in 1974, the NBCC comprises nearly 800 active book reviewers joined in common cause to promote quality writing and enrich the nation’s literary dialogue. In addition to its prestigious annual book awards program, each year the organization honors outstanding work done by an NBCC member with the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Members of the NBCC Board of Directors speak out on the country’s premier literary blog, Critical Mass. As newspapers across the country slashed book review space and fired experienced book editors in the name of belt-tightening, the NBCC decided to fight back and earlier this year launched the Campaign to Save Book Reviews, featuring blog posts by concerned writers, interviews with book editors "in the trenches," Q&A with newspaper editors and owners, a boots-on-the-ground protest in Atlanta, and more than a dozen panel discussions around the country to raise awareness of the issue. Since then the NBCC has fought to foster a national literary culture, creating a Best Recommended List, made up of the votes of its members and former book prize finalists and winners, and kicked off several new essay series on Critical Mass.

In announcing the award, AAP President and CEO Pat Schroeder said: "Since its founding more than three decades ago, the NBCC has played a central role in this country’s literary dialogue, but never has its voice been stronger or more urgently needed. We’re delighted to honor the NBCC for its passionate commitment to our favorite cause--spreading the word about great books."

The AAP Honors were inaugurated in 1997 to acknowledge the contributions of individuals and organizations outside the book industry who have helped focus public attention on American books and their importance in our society. Previous winners have included C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb, National Public Radio, country music legend Dolly Parton who created the "Imagination Library" literacy program, The Today Show, Oprah Winfrey, Latino television journalist Jorge Ramos, and USA Today.

The Association of American Publishers is the principal trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry with some 300 members comprising most of the major commercial book publishers in the United States, as well as small and medium-sized houses, non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies. The promotion of reading and literacy is among AAP’s highest priorities.

Old School

In spite of the cutbacks in many newspaper book sections, there have been a few creative gestures about how to handle books -- some in the most unexpected places, Scott McLemee wrote in a recent column about a new piece the Austin-American Statesman has begun running about academic books.

"Roger Gathman’s “The Academic Presses” debuted on Sunday in The Austin American-Statesman with a discussion of Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton University Press) and James Simpson’s Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press). Gathman has contributed to The American Scholar, The New York Observer, and Salon, among other publications. He has lived in Austin since doing graduate work in the philosophy department at the University of Texas in the 1980s; since then, aside from writing, he’s worked as a freelance editor and translator.

His inaugural piece was striking, not just for the kinds of books it covered, but for how it handled them. Academic publishing now includes a wide range of more or less popular nonfiction – not to mention cookbooks, or guides to state bicycle trails, or whatever else must be done to pay the bills. But Gathman took on two specialized (if controversial and widely discussed) works of scholarship; and he engaged with their arguments in as much depth as one humanly can, given the length restrictions of any newspaper other than the New York Review of Books."

It would be a terrific thing if this type of column took off in other towns -- Chapel Hill, New Haven, Providence, and Iowa City come to mind -- where there's a large audience of very intelligent readers who have become disengaged from the local paper. Iowa City, especially, could, and should have one of the best literary sections in the country if simply tapped into the hive of writers living nearby.

--John Freeman

PW Honors John Freeman and the NBCC

This week Publishers' Weekly released its year-end kudos to publishing honchos, and gave a nod to tireless NBCC president John Freeman and the NBCC Campaign to Save Book Reviewing. "As 2007 comes to a close, there are...five people whose efforts this year and, in two cases, over entire careers, have helped the industry keep pace with change through innovation, commitment and bright, necessary ideas," the PW report begins. The section on "John Freeman and the NBCC" concludes,
"Freeman's glass-half-full take is that since the events of last spring, non-newspaper organizations have stepped up. He commended Barnes & Noble's online review, Bookforum and the New Yorker for increasing and improving their coverage. And the NBCC has sponsored panels aplenty on the increasingly large role bloggers are playing in bringing book reviews to the public. One more upshot to the crisis? Freeman says he now has informants throughout the industry. "Someone will forward something to me saying, 'You better watch out for this.'"

photo credit: David Velasco

Half as Much Fun

Just when it seemed the cutbacks in newspaper book sections had struck bone, they've gone deeper yet this month. Starting on December 30th the Chicago Sun-Times' book section -- formerly run by Cheryl L. Reed, now by Teresa Budasi -- is being reduced by half, and moved from the Controvesy section of the newspaper to the Show section. All reviews are being reduced by half, as well, to 250 to 300 words.

These are grim times, as anyone who works in the newspaper industry will tell you -- and all sections are being affected. It feels especially too bad to see this happen at the Sun-Times, though. In the wake of the Chicago Tribune's move to running books on Saturday, the Sun-Times began running a ramped up section, even advertising (above the fold) as "the only books section on Sunday" in Chicago. The paper was treating books as a selling point.

It feels like there is still an opportunity for a visionary newspaper publisher to really go against the tide, and invest heavily in books -- say, connect the newspaper to local events, to sponsor a book festival, host a podcast or a radio show, run a blog, draw in local novelist or two as columnists, email its reviews out to subscribers, host web-only content, run Q&As with authors passing through town, start a book-club, reach out to non-book-industry advertisers -- and tap into the still very large group of people who care about reading. (It's worth noting that Frank Wilson does some of this in Philly, as does the New York Times, the LA Times, and the Guardian).

The good news here is that the Sun-Times' section might possibly be able to get back some of its space back by running web only pieces. Let's hope that does happen, so they can maintain the diversity of voices the paper had become good at bringing forward in recent years.

Reading at Risk, Redux

The NEA has released a new, deeper study about reading in America, which has been much remarked upon. The Washington Post ran a story two days ago which summarized some of the points. It looks like we do a decent job of getting children to read at young ages, but neglect them as they enter adolescence -- with 15-24 year-olds reading just 7-10 minutes per day by choice.

This data seems pretty unequivocal -- we need to do better -- but I'm sure it will be open to debate as to what those solutions should be. I found it interesting that the NEA's chairman took the time in Publisher's Lunch to point out something we've always believed:

"Oddly, one of Gioia's recommended solutions is more coverage of books in popular culture: "I guarantee that if we could expand the coverage in the media, you'd immediately see people responding. People are looking for things to do that aren't dumb. I don't think that Americans are dumber than before, but I do believe our public culture is."

If you want to talk back to this story, tell us what you think here, or you can go over to Sarah T. Williams' in depth column at the Star Tribune, which has a comment section here.

The State We're In

Over at Kottke.org, NBCC member Joel Turnipseed has curated an interesting week long series of posts by Steven Johnson, NBCC board member Rebecca Skloot, Douglas Wolk, and others about the state we're in these days. -- on several fronts. Today NBCC board member Jane Ciabattari answered a few questions posed to her about criticism today, blogging, and the NBCC's spring campaign to save book reviews.

JT: Anyone who's worked at a newspaper knows how discomfiting it can be to see all the books that go unreviewed—that's something you don't hear a lot about: questions about who gets reviewed, why, and so on. The world's bloggers may not be the best critics (though many are wickedly smart): but from the writers' and readers' and publishers' perpectives, wouldn't we all be better off if publishers sent 100-200 galleys of every book to the 100-200 most-prominent bloggers in the circles of interest most likely to buy or enjoy a given book? It seems like there's a lot of inefficiency in the marketplace—and a place for a burgeoning trend here, doesn't it?

JC: As much as it makes sense to send galleys to prominent bloggers, I think you have to think first about readers; ultimately, the majority of online readers still go to newspaper websites for their information. The evolution of newspapers continues. Beginning in September, the Audit Bureau of Circulation will combine print and online circulation of newspapers, which I believe will show a better picture of what has been going on in the United States. In July, for instance, 59.6 million people visited newspaper websites, a 9 percent increase over the same period a year ago. Nearly eight in ten adults read a print or online newspaper each week. As I've noted, many of the best literary bloggers are writing for newspaper book review sections and online websites. Readers are also going to communities like Readerville.com, which is a terrific website for readers and writers. Internet space may be infinite, but readers are pressed for time: I suspect quality will out, online or off.

See Jerome Speak

Jerome Weeks, long-time NBCC member, former book critic at the Dallas Morning News, and patron of bookdaddy.com, will be hosting a panel this weekend at the Texas Book Festival called Lit Crit: The State of the Book Review, featuring, among others, former Balakian winner Steven G. Kellman, members Ed Nawotka and Jessa Crispin, and critic and NPR radio commentator Alan Cheuse. Before you start whingeing about this being yet another panel on this topic, Jerome has a caveat:

"In our defense, book/daddy must confess that a panel on the troubles in book reviewing was his idea -- almost a year ago, I pitched it to Clay Smith, the director of the festival. This was long before the dismissal of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's books editor, before the cutbacks at the LA Times and elsewhere, before the uproar in litblogs, before the National Book Critics Circle's "save the endangered book page" campaign, and before everyone else and his cousin had presented a panel on the same topic.

Our panel will just be better than everyone else's. So there."

**

Dawn Davis: Did Book Reviews Help Edward P. Jones?

Dawn Davis, editorial director of Amidstad, edited Edward P. Jones's novel The Known World, which won the National Book Critics Circle fiction award and the Pulitzer award in fiction in 2004. When she appeared at the NBCC panel on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: Can Criticism and Promotion Coexist Today," moderator John Freeman, NBCC president, asked if book reviews helped Jones's book.

"We got a New York Times review in the daily, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, very early on. What reviews did do was keep the book in the bookstores and keep the internal interest and get producers interested. Review attention keeps the faith. We as editors have to sell the book internally. Outside reviews are validation."

Davis mentioned that Anna Deavere Smith read “An Orange Line Train to Ballston,”a story from Jones's first collection, Lost in the City, which won the PEN/Hemingway award, at Symphony Space in 2004. Jones published a second story collection in 2006, All Aunt Hagar's Children. And, she added, "Oprah does a good job of getting 900,000 people to read a book people wouldn't necessarily have heard about."

What We Talk When We Talk About Books

The NBCC hosted Powells.com marketing director Dave Weich on our recent panel, "What We Talk about When We Talk About Books." To collect his thoughts about the question of whether promotiong and critical culture can coexist, Dave put together this essay.

The question, for me, isn't whether book criticism and promotion can coexist. They do coexist, to the point of being almost inseparable. The question to ask is what either one, criticism or promotion, might look like without the other.

Most published reviews focus on books that recently arrived in stores. These titles will never again enjoy such an opportunity to gain a readership. Draw attention to a book by reviewing it and you are, in effect, promoting it. You might trash it, but your attention confirms that the book is worthy of conversation. Compliment it and you're practically giving it breath.

A trade secret I'll share: Booksellers read reviews to confirm or deny suspicions we have about books we haven't yet read. We can't read everything. There's simply not enough time. So we ask, "What did PW say?" "Did Kirkus like it?" Often we'll take a chance with a title -- or we won't -- depending entirely on how it's been described by a reviewer we trust; the next thing we know, we've read it, enjoyed it, and told dozens (if not hundreds or, online, thousands) of people to give it a try.

Every day, our customers wander up to the information desk and ask about a title they saw reviewed in the Times or The Oprah Magazine or Bookforum. Maybe Bookforum doesn’t reach the masses, but its pages speak with authority to a passionate microculture that happens to be, sacrilegious as this may sound, consumers of exactly the kind of book to which Bookforum devotes column inches. Whether a "marketplace" -- uncover your ears, Freeman! It's nothing but a word -- ever figured into the calculations of the reviewer or the review's distributor, the book's commercial future can’t help but be affected by a review.

How many new books were published in the United States last year? Close to two hundred thousand, if I remember correctly. The National Book Critics Circle serves fewer than eight hundred members, I believe. Do the math. Every author's enemy is silence.

But let's set aside for now the battle for our reading culture's mindshare. A well written review, whether positive or negative, makes me want to decide about the book for myself. It activates my curiosity. At the very least, I'll seek out another review, a second opinion.

Reviewers: Why spend your time and energy reviewing a book that wouldn't be of interest to at least some portion of your readership? The author could fail on every meaningful level, the book could be complete garbage, but if it was worth your attention in the first place one must assume that some portion of your audience, under the right circumstances, would consider reading it. After all, most books worth discussing have at least some redeeming qualities. If you didn't believe that, why would you write about books?

But you can't always write about your favorites, can you? You can't get by focusing exclusively on the ones you reread again and again. You rarely have the opportunity to read a book in full more than once, I'd bet. You have deadlines. And editors. And if you do this well enough to get paid for it, that's likely because someone, somewhere, will pay to read what you write, or to advertise beside it, or to fund it in the name of the arts. You are a vital cog in the commercial engine of bookselling -- more impactful (and certainly more immediate) to that financial machine, I would argue, than to posterity or any longstanding canonical record.

I am not being cynical. I do not mean to discount what you do. I am thankful for reviews. They make my job so much easier. They enrich my life. I only mean to point out that the cheering you hear in the fourth row behind home plate, and the booing from the upper deck, it's all promotion of a kind, for one team or another, for the sport. Reviews promote reading. What every reader needs is advice about what's worth their time. Every writer yearns for someone to recommend their work. I speak not only of authors of books, but of reviewers, too.

When you submit to the Cleveland Plain Dealer or Virginia Quarterly Review, does not some part of you hope that a reader will be so intrigued by what you've written that they'll go straight out and buy the book? Or, otherwise, to buy another book that, by way of comparison, you claim to be more valuable?

No matter. Within days, an excerpt of your review is posted on the product pages of online book stores, possibly on the author's own web site. Truly glowing or insightful blurbs soon appear in publishers' press kits, and eventually make their way into the pages, or onto the cover, of paperback editions. And so the promotional wheel turns.

--Dave Weich is director of marketing and development for Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of more than 200 interviews with writers, and the creator and producer of the Out of the Book film series, which debuted in June with a feature about Ian McEwan's Man Booker Prize-nominated novel "On Chesil Beach." This November, Out of the Book's second installment, a film about David Halberstam's final, great work, "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War," will be screened in nearly 75 cities across America.

Panel Recap: What We Talk About When We Talk about Books

If reading is a solitary pursuit, how can publishers reach a mass audience? What role (if any) do book reviews play in this process? And what can be done – by reviewers, by publishers, by authors – to reverse the slide in reading and appreciating books among Americans?

Several panelists addressed these questions at last Friday’s NBCC panel, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: Can Criticism and Promotion Coexist Today?” at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in Greenwich Village. Participants included David Kipen, director of the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Reading Initiative; Nan A. Talese, publisher of the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday imprint; Eric Banks, editor-in-chief, Bookforum; Dawn Davis, editorial director of Amistad; and Dave Weich, director of marketing and development for Powell’s books, the Portland, Ore. bookstore and on-line book retailer. NBCC president John Freeman moderated.

Kipen kicked things off by questioning whether there really is a slide in Americans’ reading habits. Formerly the book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, Kipen acknowledged recent “not-so-encouraging polls, that 1 in 4 people in America hadn’t read a book in the last year...it’s demoralizing until you consider that in 2002 there was a poll that indicated that 1 in 2 people in America hadn’t read a book.” If the poll numbers are meaningful, “we’ve cut that figure in half."

Kipen said the endowment’s “The Big Read” program “stole Seattle and Chicago’s idea” of the “One Book” program. These programs, in which interested readers in a particular city read the same book, open up the discussion of the “one book” to many people.

Kipen encouraged critics to have hope - “don’t wring your hands when you could be making common cause with the rest of the country.” Readers all over the country can now access the New York Times book review online, but Kipen said readers “still want good local book reviews as much as they want local news."

Panel moderator Freeman asked Nan A. Talese how she would get the word out about a talented but unknown author today.

Talese said that literary novels generally sell about 4,000 copies. Using Ian McEwan as an example of a “literary” author who made it big, Talese noted that Americans didn’t know about McEwan until his seventh novel.

Only recently has the American reading public become interested in the Man Booker Prize, Talese said. When McEwan won the Booker for “Amsterdam” in October 1998, the timing was fortunate: Talese was able to get “Amsterdam” into bookstores in America by Christmas. When his next book, 2002’s “Atonement” came out, he had developed an American audience.

But not every Booker winner catches on with the American public, and timing can make a difference. “Sacred Hunger” by Barry Unsworth was published in April. When it won the Booker in October 1992, most of the books had already been returned by bookstores to the publisher, Talese said.

Reviews, Talese said, “are part of a very, very gradual process of building excitement.” Sometimes reviews help, sometimes they don’t - she’s seen a book review get front-page treatment in the New York Times, and “the needle never went up.”

Dave Weich of Powell’s Books said that Powell’s online operation has an ongoing program to “differentiate ourselves from our competitors.” Reviews play a part in that - Powell’s-type readers are interested in reading book reviews, negative and positive – “By providing independent voices, we would build integrity,” Weich said. “We do publish negative reviews. We want our readers to feel like they’re getting the truth. For Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” we published four or five uncensored, unedited reviews."

Freeman asked Eric Banks of Bookforum if the language of promotion has affected criticism. Banks said that’s not an issue in his publication, but “Bookforum is different. We give people enough space to unfold an argument.” He added that what Bookforum chooses to review is in and of itself a form of promotion - “We select what we think folks are going to know about and talk about.” Though a primary source of Bookforum’s revenue is publisher ads, Banks said there’s a firewall between ad content and review coverage.

Freeman asked Dawn Davis, editorial director of Amistad, if the extraordinary reviews received by Edward P. Jones’ “The Known World” made a difference. Davis said they did: “We got a (great) New York Times review before publication. Then we got the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor. It kept the energy going. It keeps the faith internally. Suddenly it’s not just the editors saying, ‘that’s a great book’ – it’s the outside world.”

Weich said reviews play a part in determining which authors to promote – “there are just too many books for us to get through them all, to read them all.” But it wasn’t just Ian McEwan’s stellar literary reputation – it was his “articulate and consummate professional nature” that made him a good choice for Powell’s first “Out of the Book” feature film.

Talese said McEwan, a veteran of the wear-and-tear of the traditional author’s tour, was thrilled with the idea of the film, which was shown in bookstores around the country – McEwan called “a virtual tour” a “fabulous” idea. Weich said Powell’s was surprised by the reception to the film in small to medium sized cities, especially in the Midwest, where “name” author like McEwan don’t generally tour. And at the Harvard bookstore, the bookstore sponsored a contest in which people wrote about their “first time” experiences (McEwan’s latest book, “On Chesil Beach,” is about two honeymooners) – the winner read the submission at the bookstore.

Banks of Bookforum said some promotional efforts can work at cross-purposes with the review function of a publication. “I’m a little uncomfortable with podcasting…. if you interview the author on Tuesday on a podcast, how can you trust the review that runs in this publication? Authors aren’t going to want to participate in a podcast when there’s been an honest but negative review of their books."

Talese said books and the literary arts are a challenge to promote because “human beings are social beings, and of all the arts, books are the only ones that are solitary.” It’s a worthwhile challenge to try to deliver to many people simultaneously the voice of the author. The “social” factor is one reason book clubs spontaneously became a phenomenon in this country.

Weich of Powell’s said that “if the book industry has failed, it’s in the lack of options they’ve afforded the reader. It’s true that reading is solitary, but the marketing of the book can’t be solitary. I’d love to sit around with my friends and talk about a book, but they haven’t read those books.” That was one germ of the idea around the “Out of the Book” film project.

Freeman asked about the debate within the literary world over whether the kind of conversation created by Oprah Winfrey around books, is a good thing.

Weich said that “for a long time the lit establishment has had control over that dialogue, about what makes a ‘good’ book and why people should read them. It’s been a monologue. I wish reviewers would think less about their personal tastes and judgments and more about what kind of audience is right for this book."

After the panel, author Salman Rushdie made a brief appearance and highlighted some of the discussed themes - “However much we bitch about each other, it’s clear that we need each other,” he said. “How do you draw attention to new writers who don’t get on the cover of the magazine? Print and new media compliment each other very well."

Mary Ann Gwinn
NBCC board member

Grub Street 2.0 Recap

I was about to write-up the Grub Street 2.0 panel from last week, but then someone showed me a writer in the audience named Richard Grayson has recorded it practically verbatim (thank you, Richard!) You can read his dispatch here, which is great, and another here from NBCC member Michael Orthofer, who captures a point I wish I had made/asked while the panelists were in the room. The internet has certainly -- at least for me -- helped to internationalize book coverage. One can read the literary news of any English speaking country in the world now at no cost instantaneously, and with a little dusting off of your high school English/Spanish/German, that of many other foreign countries, too. I can't help but think that will change the nature of literary discourse, and make old blind-spots a little less defendible as the literary community begins to be defined by what one can find with their browser, not at their bookstore. (Although it won't help if we continue to translate as few books as we do at the moment). Still, I'm curious if this has already begun to change literary coverage (in all medium) today.

**

Keeping Literary Magazines in Libraries: Susan Thomas Has a Suggestion

This is the year of the flip, the final shift in university libraries around the country to a higher proportion of electronic database subcriptions than print subscriptions. Throughout the country, public and academic librarians are eliminating periodials from shelves, partly to free up shelf and storage space, but mostly because of a budget squeeze. Scientific journals are expensive (subscriptions can run a hundred dollars or more). As a sort of collatoral damage, literary publications, which are much less expensive and in some cases impossible to duplicate in digital form, are disappearing, too.

This latest development in book culture was the focus of the September 13 NBCC panel, "Literary Magazines Go Electronic: Now Where's the Print Edition in the Library," cosponsored by Library Journal and moderated by LJ book review editor and NBCC board member Barbara Hoffert, who noted, "The fate of literary magazines may hang in the balance." The panelists included Karen Gisonny, head of periodicals at the New York Public Library; Brigid Hughes, editor of A Public Space; Jeffrey Lependorf, executive director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (formerly CCLM); author D.T. Max,NBCC member and Nona Balakian award winner Scott McLemee of Insidehighered.com, Kevin Prufer, NBCC board member, poet, and editor of Pleiades, and Susan Thomas, a librarian at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY.

Prufer inspired the panel when, as described in his post on Critical Mass, he dropped by the library at the University of Central Missouri to catch up on the latest poetry reviews and discovered that quarterlies like the Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others were no longer on the shelves. The librarian directed him to the electronic database. But digital format, he noted, cannot duplicate publications like the Virginia Quarterly Review, which are carefully curated from graphics and special paper to fiction by authors like Nadine Gordimer, who did not sell electronic rights to the story the VQR published recently.

Library subscriptions are a substantial portion of the income for some literary magazines, Lependorf pointed out. Newsstand sales to bookstores are in danger right now, as well, he added, because a major distributor went out of business recently. And one commonly used database for literary magazines is intended for archiving, not for current publications; the newest versions are three years old.

Susan Thomas (pictured above) offered a solution for academic libraries: Lobby the librarians. And lobby the provost, the dean of humanities, the vice president, the president. Ask them to keep literary magazines and small press publications on the shelves. "Reading a literary magazine is such a relief after hours at the computer screen," she said. "My job is to encourage young people to become lifelong learners. They lose interest in reading on the computer. If I can put an exciting literary magazine in their hands, it can be important." This approach can also work for public libraries.

That was not the only good news of the evening. Brigid Hughes said that she had no problem convincing librarians in college and university with MFA programs to subscribe to A Public Space. (The publication also has a complementary website.)

Karen Gisonny of the New York Public Library has maintained a strong periodicals collection; the NYPL also houses the print archives of the collected thousands of publications of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and CCLM.

Prufer had the last word of the evening. After his protest to the librarian at the University of Central Missouri, he said, the subscriptions to the quarterlies he loved were restored.

Hats Off to Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie, who appeared with Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report in the Spring in support of the NBCC Campaign to Save Book Reviewing, dropped by Housing Works last night as the NBCC wrapped up a day of panels (Grub Street 2.0: The Future of Book Coverage and What We Talk About When We Talk about Books: Can Criticism and Promotion Coexist Today) to offer moral support, noting how much space has been lost from book pages over the last year. "Writers and book reviewers need each other," said Rushdie, a graceful and astute critic himself. "I remember an essay about Midnight's Children by Robert Towers in "The New York Review of Books" that taught me about the book." First novelists in particular need critics. "How do you learn about new writers, if not through reviews?"

Newpaper book reviews and literary blogs are not at odds with each other, he added. The two forms coexist and, he said, "We need both."