Having a "clubby" culture is one explanation, but another factor could be that the NYRB just gets very high profile contributors. For example Zadie Smith has written essays for the NYRB, while also being the subject of reviews. Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them?
I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.
It's a positive feedback loop: an author becomes high profile by getting positive reviews in the NYRB -> they become more likely to contribute to the NYRB -> they become more likely to get more positive reviews, and so on. Literature is especially cliquey--almost all the most famous writers are based out of hubs like New York, London, Paris. How many authors get passed over just because they happen to live somewhere else? There are so many books released every year that it would be impossible for any one publication to review them all. So instead of a curation of the best authors, publications like this inevitably just become a curation of authors who are in the club.
Don Thompson gets after this from another angle in "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art". The particular thread I'm thinking of is the purchases of Charles Saatchi. It looks externally like there's a positive feedback loop where he collects you, which makes you famous, which makes your work valuable, which he can then sell. But ... if you look at the average value of work in Saatchi's collection, it asymptotically approaches $0. The man buys a lot of art. Warehouses full of stuff that hasn't been seen. Similarly, there are a lot of poor writers in New York. Is there a positive feedback loop? Try measuring it.
> Literature is especially cliquey--almost all the most famous writers are based out of hubs like New York, London, Paris.
Is this true?
Smith, discussed in the parent, sure, born and lives in London. In general, I have a suspicion this concentration is more true of British authors than American ones, although the most recent one I can think of that came to fame is...
Sally Rooney? Ireland.
Naming a few other famous novelists I've heard of in the last several years, and doing some quick Googling... trying to stick to "literary" ones:
Franzen? Santa Cruz
Knausgård? Sweden + London. Looks like it was only London after he got famous, though.
Ferrante? Heh, well, famously nobody knows for sure, but seems like people believe Italy.
Stephen King? Maine until very recently. Go further into genre content and we get out of the point of the "literature" discussion here, though.
I'm looking at novelists vs columnists both because of the example given of Smith and because novelists are less geographically constrained than someone whose day job is to write for a publication that historically has been based in those cities, to try to avoid "once you're in the club you get the job that makes you move to the city" factors.
The relevant term here is "coterie", and I think the key is that it's easier to find and become part of one in the hub cities, not that they don't exist in a more attenuated form elsewhere.
Well writing novels is something that people who grow up in New York aspire to do more than people who grow up elsewhere, and those from elsewhere with those ambitions often move to places like New York.
Seems like there's scope for building local literature review communities (or book clubs lol) but that properly review local authors.. The interesting question for me would be how this system works
You can't compete against "New York" or "London" on locality terms. They just have so many more people in a small area; they're an implicit link farm. To build something up that can challenge the literary mainstream, you've got to align on something else.
I do think something like this is already happening, but along genre lines. Twenty years ago, self-publishing was a last resort option for people who were mostly writing perma-slush. Ten years ago, it was an admissible strategy for certain genres but still considered an undesirable way to go for most authors. Five years ago, it had become a respectable alternative (in part, due to consolidation-induced dysfunction in trade publishing). Now, we're starting to see self-publishing take over literary fiction [1] as well.
This isn't necessary good news--to self-publishing properly is expensive, beyond what most people can afford; and traditional houses are now able to farm out their risk unto authors--so much as it is a mix of good and bad, but the scene is changing and I think the New York literati are already under 20% of peak relevance (midcentury). They confer a bit of prestige, but they don't actually get you read, and they certainly don't get you read deeply, which is what you want if you want your books to still be read 20 years from now.
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[1] I'll skip over the long, long debate over "What is literary fiction?" That would add 3 kilowords to this post, just to define terms.
>I'll skip over the long, long debate over "what is literary fiction?" that would add 3 kilowords to this post, just to define terms.
I'll bite:
Self-publishing began as an option for publishing books that nobody reads, evolved over time into a viable option for publishing books that some people would read, and finally reached the high status of being an option for publishing books that nobody reads.
> I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.
In fact, how else are you going to find qualified reviewers but to find people who were reviewed well? Does it make sense to get people whose works are bad to review other people's?
Smith's NYRB essay 'Generation Why?,' is essential reading IMO [0].
She nicely explains how so many bright, hardworking folks can end up optimizing on goals that made sense to, e.g., a 20 year old college dropout, but that might not produce much social value overall. Considering when she wrote it, the essay is downright prophetic.
The general point about the magazine being a venue for "elitist, East coast, alternative, intellectual, left-winged" [1] authors to write to and about each other is well taken. But I don't think they just got lucky in featuring ZS, I think they make an active effort to get good authors writing on important topics.
In some circumstances, nepotism and meritocracy might be observationally equivalent [2].
[2] I think it was Gary King who said this, on the subject of how top ranked political science departments dominate the job market, but I can't find the exact quote.
Thanks for linking that article, fascinating read! It's incredible how much an article from 2010 (over a decade ago!) can resonate with how I feel about social media today and easily put the vague discomforts I've felt about it into words.
> I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.
These are completely different matters. Any idiot can have an opinion on just about any non-academic literature. Whether any idiot can be taken seriously is up to debate. Whereas for math papers, there are very few people outside the pool of authors who can understand enough of it to even have an opinion.
Strategic reviewing, especially when it comes to funding requests, is not really unknown in academic circles, at least in the social sciences and humanities.
I think some might read the original question as saying that the books reviewed wouldn't be reviewed unless they were contributors. Zadie Smith's books would get reviewed whether she'd contributed or not, but she still counts towards the "clubby" total.
While most comments focus on fiction, I find the real value of the NYRB for me are the reviews of nonfiction books. These reviews go into much more depth than reviews in other places and often compare and contrast multiple books on the same topic. The nonfiction reviews are great for both finding books to read and learning enough about a topic so that you can decide that you don't need to read a book on that topic.
Maybe not entirely a bad thing, if one plumber says that this other plumber is good I assume he knows what he's talking about. The flipside, of course, is that a mutual appreciation society excludes interesting outsiders.
The biggest issue is that there are lots of writers and wannabe writers, but not very many readers in the US, not compared to other countries. (On the other hand, the US book market is huge, so we have that to our advantage.) And, for an ugly secret, most of the people who make the big decisions in the literary world don't really read more than the casual reader (who still reads more than 97% of the population, but that's another topic.)
If you actually become a lead title, you're going to get lots of interviews with famous people who didn't actually read your book, but who had interns skim it and prepare questions. (Jon Stewart was a notable exception; he did try to read all the guest books.) Editors and literary agents do generally read the works they select and produce, but not in the same way--it's more like 200-page-per-hour skimming--and it's not because they're lazy--far from it--but because they're overworked. Which is why the difference between a dead-end deal with a four-digit advance and no marketing and a seven-figure balls-out launch is based on Hollywood-style four-quadrant analyses and favor-trading rather than the quality of the work itself.
The good news is that so much of these things authors get worked up about don't actually matter all that much. It might be infuriating to learn that you're not getting a book tour, but typical book tours don't actually drive that many sales relative to the effort they require of the author. It's very hard to predict what will drive sales; I know people who've had national TV spots and only sold ~20 copies from them.
330 million people, plus 38 more in a neighboring country who speak the same language (and are, therefore, arguably part of the same market).
Plus, people still buy books even if the readership rate is low.
Mostly, though, it's our population. If you're a Hungarian-language novelist and you sell to 0.1% of the total market (this is hard to do) you've made food money for a couple years. If you can find a way to get 0.1% of Americans to buy your book, you're a millionaire.
Of course, even getting people to hear about you at all is difficult, especially with "book buzz" hype machines [1] sucking up so much oxygen while delivering disappointing or forgettable books.
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[1] This is the part of traditional publishing I don't like. When bad books get so 7-figure advances and huge marketing campaigns, they cause reader attrition at a population level and this makes the world scarcer for serious writers. Trade publishing still does far more good than harm to society, but the "book buzz" people who run Manhattan could all stop showing up to work and we'd be better off.
What makes the US a single market with 330M people and not a bunch of smaller markets? Is it just that somewhere like Europe has barriers to entry through language and differences in countries' regulation that don't come up in the US?
I can relate to a story set in places in the Deep South and Midwest, places I have barely been, because the author speaks to common motifs, assumptions and subtext. (This also lets them play with implication, something lost if one must be explicit about what may lost outside one’s culture.)
This reminded me of a tangential complaint: I (in the US) recently bought one of Richard Osman's books, and its setting is more English than actual England is. So why did the publisher insist on adjusting the spelling to "Labor Party"? It's a proper noun, and I'm going to pronounce it "lay-BOOOUUURRR" like I always do... you're not fooling anybody into thinking this took place in New Jersey. Did they think Americans would find the extra U offensive or confusing??
Plumbing is not entirely a zero sum game, and referrals are a big part of exploiting division of labor. If two plumbers are good at different aspects of plumbing, giving referrals to each other when they're called to jobs for which the other one is better suited has positive dividends - better plumbing gets done and customers are happier. A plumber passing on work this way is passing up the immediate benefit of a contract in hand, but presumably trades that for a better contract in the future that he might otherwise not have gotten, not for nothing at all.
Sure, yes, coalitions form in even unlikely places. But even so, come on. Plumbing is largely a zero sum game, or at least far more so than book sales.
Perhaps, but it's not relevant to the situation I described, which relied on each plumber having an absolute advantage over the other one. For relative advantage to come into play, there would have to be some kind of limit to the total amount of work one plumber could do.
Private Eye periodically reports on "log rolling" in book reviews - where an author approached by a journalist will recommend books with the same publisher, or the same publicist, or the same agent.
So I wouldn't be surprised if one found a similar pattern across the entire publishing industry.
Having been through this as an editor, there is an issue where, for instance, how do you get blurbs for a book? You ask people the author knows, people you know, people your colleagues know, if you can thumb-wrestle an address out of them, etc. There's a chain. On the other end, any moderately-successful author is getting a lot of such requests, so they're going to filter in reverse.
What keeps people from getting blurbs from people with common names that also belong to famous authors--such as Stephen King? I can't imagine it's illegal to get a blurb from Stephen A. King, schoolteacher in Idaho, and use it sans middle initial. So why aren't more people doing it? It may be Saul Goodman-esque, but if blurbs actually drive sales, it makes sense.
Except that when you're found out (generic "you", not the author of the comment), you are disgraced: everyone soon knows that you're a fraud.
And social media will expose this kind of fraud very quickly.
Doesn't matter if it's legal: the Internet then identifies you as the idiot who tried to pass off a schoolteacher in Idaho as the famous Stephen King. That will tank a career.
Yeah, it'd be a bad look for a self-publisher, but it seems like traditional publishing has enough indirection that it could work... and compared to the sausage-making that drives "book buzz" it's relatively mild.
For traditional publishing the publisher is a suit magnet; Stephen King's lawyers would have a field day. Bette Midler won big damages against Ford when they asked her to endorse a product, she turned them down, so they hired an impersonator:
I don't think misrepresenting others and premeditated lying for personal gain are at all "relatively mild".
Just because the scope of the lie is relatively small and unlikely to cause significant damages, doesn't do enough to counter the extreme brazenness and tastelessness of this.
The American magazine Spy used to do this as well back in the 80s, with a monthly column called "Log rolling in our time" calling out authors writing blurbs for each other.
This is just the beginning when it comes to the sausage-making that goes into "book buzz" (which is anything but organic, because the people who generate it don't actually read most of the books they're paid to talk about) and the major reviews. It gets a lot worse. Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be bestsellers and which ones are there just to make the lead titles shine by comparison.
Reader word-of-mouth doesn't really get a voice in the traditional book world, because it's slow, because reading takes time... and it's not publishers who started this fire, but the chain bookstores who abused the consignment model (Great Depression hangover) and invented the 8-week rotation. Publishers actually do care about the future of literature and being decent to the authors they're publishing... but these days if the chain bookstores don't like your numbers, you're dead after two months on the shelf (and will be difficult for publishers to place in the future)... and the economics of the whole system follow from that.
If you're not going to be a lead title--and that depends on who your agent is, not the quality of your book, and your odds of even being read (let alone represented) by that kind of agent are less than 1% no matter how good your book is--then you're going to find traditional publishing experience extremely disappointing. The current system is based on selling huge numbers of copies (or not) in the first couple months, not on producing evergreen titles or building audiences.
That said, reader word-of-mouth does get a voice in the long term, and self-publishing is a better option if you can afford it. (It costs about $20 per kiloword to do it right, though; you have to hire at least one editor, preferably two, as well as a cover designer.) You won't get reviewed by famous people, because you don't benefit from the network of "Do X or the next call is from my boss to your boss" phone calls that run NYC publishing, but you'll have more creative control and probably make more money in the long term.
I should say "are supposed to be* bestsellers. I have heard horror stories where someone gets a lead title package and the book still flops. Whether that's because of a bad book or just terrible luck, I don't know enough about it to say.
But the chain bookstores are definitely a big part of the problem whereby publishers are expected to bet big on a few books ("lead titles") and let the others wither. The publishers didn't ask to be in this world.
Sounds like peer review? It's difficult to find people who can provide an informed analysis of an activity unless you choose from amongst people who can do that activity themselves
In peer review, if a small clique of authors reviewed each-other's articles favorably, while ignoring, and being ignored, by the rest of their field, that would be ethically problematic.
If NYBR reviewers mostly review books by other NYBR reviewers, while ignoring the tremendous amount of other quality authors and literature, that is likewise problematic.
Unless one speciously defines the type of book that NYBR would review as its own genre (analogous to a researchers field), shrinking the candidate literature down what NYBR reviews.
> In peer review, if a small clique of authors reviewed each-other's articles favorably, while ignoring, and being ignored, by the rest of their field, that would be ethically problematic.
The comparison to peer review is perfect, because exactly this happens across many areas of research.
Any area where the pool of potential reviewers is small enough that everyone (sort of) knows everyone else, the process tends to get corrupted by concerns over personal networks, careers, grant funding, etc. etc.
Much as prestigious book review cliques get corrupted by networks, careers, access to publishers, etc. etc.
Exactly this. I found out the embarrassing way (by asking a journalism tutor) how to end up being a writer like Perry Anderson because I enjoyed one of his longer pieces in the LRB, reviewing the work of an illustrious writer on the history of the EU (Luk van de Midelaar). He told me if I wanted to be like that, I'd need to contribute to the New Left Review for six decades and also be a Marxist historian.
The point being, becoming a peer of that kind is impossible to do through academia, so some people consider it "clubby". It is, perhaps, that these people have been both commercially successful in their niche and influential that confers that peerhood, not shared social ties (although I'm certain those form too).
This is a beautifully long-winded way of confirming that "Literature" is simply a genre that people confuse for quality.
The people who write books that get featured in NYRB and the New Yorker, that come up through Iowa, etc, are the people that know that genre well. So of course they're welcome critics of it.
If you like the stuff that NYRB features, then you'll eat up reviews by those same authors. It would be silly for NYRB not to invite those reviews. Every other genre publication does the same thing.
It's only a problem if you let yourself buy into the idea that this style of work is more than an upper middle class fashion.
Pulications like NYRB and the New Yorker review books in many genres. Arguably, what defines 'literature' is quality (which I'll leave undefined), regardless of the genre. From that perspective, saying there is no difference between literature and non-literature is like saying there is no difference between NBA basketball players and those who couldn't make the NBA, or maybe more accurately, that there is no difference between typical developers at Google and those in the IT department of a mid-sized law firm (to pick an organization outside the tech field).
My experience is that there is, generally speaking, a clear qualitative difference between literature and non-literature.
It's an old trope to deny 'fine' arts have merit, but often such denials lack an assertion or evidence - they just deny someone else's. What do you think the state of such things is? All is equal? Everything is subjective? That would be pretty extreme.
Taken literally, this is a bit silly. I've read (and written) unpublished chapters that were absolutely terrible. There's clearly some kind of quality control going on.
It's just that the top 1% of literary output is a huge volume of work and most of it is pretty good. The fashion is which of the top books make it in front of you, but you're not seeing the invisible 90% of books that would never get there, or the 9% that need a lot of luck and an editor with a hatchet.
Hah. Yes, of course I wasn’t saying that quality isn’t applicable to the books they choose, but the quality is measured by genre expectations (and artful deviations therefrom) just like for all genres.
Inside the community of contemporary authors, editors, and MFA programs, there’e no real controversy to the idea that the writing suitable for NYRB, The New Yorker, etc is just a genre with specific, evolving expectations.
There are countless amazing works that those same authors and editors hold in extremely high regard, but that would not suit those publications on account of being too “something else”.
Really, it’s mostly the lay public that still carries a special sense of deference and esteem for this genre, thinking of that work as the inheritor of the Western Canon, itself being something that they were taught to see as the epitome of “Good Writing” rather than “Powerful Examples of a Certain Style”
NYRB in the nineties when I was reading it was absolutely amazing. I can say that my life and my tastes would be different without it. In the 2000s it got much thinner. The articles were shorter, and under GWB it veered much more into politics. The editors felt that they had to spend their cultural capital on politics under the circumstances, but they spent a lot.
Many years later I got to see the premiere of Scorsese's documentary with Bob Silvers in attendance and it's a cherished memory.
The manner of NYRB book reviews -- essays often covering 'n'
related books on a given topic, are also more specific to NYRB's formula. Form and function...
The length of their reviews & essays isn't common among other, similar lit rags.
The other distinguishing feature of those "reviews" is that they often take the form of "Author A.B wants to write an essay about X. Here are 3 or 4 books somehow related to X that A.B will comment on during the course of their essay."
https://slate.com/culture/2001/08/one-cheer-for-cheering.htm... - first line "Spy magazine had a column titled “Logrolling in Our Time,” devoted to exposing authors who traded good reviews back and forth. " which I remember, it was pretty funny sometimes.
Good writers probably do have the best insight on what the best books are, but that's a clear conflict of interest. It also gives less visibility to new or "indie" writers.
Some sites, such as Drive Thru RPG, do not allow you to leave reviews if you are a publisher, presumably to avoid this conflict. Folks can certainly log on with their personal account, but at least it is some level of accountability.
This is the same as paper reviewers for academic journals. The reviewer are usually authors whose work has been accepted into the journal. And then you build up better contacts and also you know how the review process works intimately and this are more likely to get papers accepted.
(I was published in and then a reviewer for an academic journal.)
I looked carefully, but did not find in the article what is expected. Is the contention that authors who do not contribute do not get reviewed? Or that otherwise successful authors are excluded?
I once went to dinner with some NYRB reviewers and was thoroughly impressed that yes, it’s the New York Review of Each Other’s Books. I haven’t given it any respect since.
Interesting question: Maybe the barrier to entry for directors is much higher than authors. The budget required for a film greatly limits the output; any critic can try writing a book.
But I wonder how many film critics try making short film? With modern digital video and YouTube, it's possible.
I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.