Lady Chatterley’s Brother The first ebook in the new TQC Long Essays series,  called “an exciting new project” by Chad Post of Open Letter and Three Percent. Why can't Nicholson Baker write about sex? And why can Javier Marias? We investigate why porn is a dead end, and why seduction paves the way for the sex writing of the future.
Available now from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and direct from this site:
Translate This Book! Ever wonder what English is missing? Called "a fascinating  read" by The New Yorker, Translate This Book! brings together over 40 of the top translators, publishers, and authors to tell us what books need to be published in English. Get it on Kindle for 99 cents.
|
Shop though these links = Support this site
Interviews from Conversational Reading  See this page for interviews with leading authors, translators, publishers, and more.
|
Consumer Reports
The Literary Saloon links me to this bit of wisdom:
Unlike The New Yorker or the New York Review of Books, in both of which the objective is to deliver the "definitive review" of a book, Tanenhaus explained that The New York Times Book Review has an obligation to publish the review that — for its timeliness and "consumer report" style — will be most important to a book’s commercial success or failure.
A couple things confuse me here. First, what is this "definitive review"? It would seem to me, book reviews being akin to the provoberial first draft of history, "definitive review" would be an oxymoron.
And yet, if I cannot get behind aiming toward the definitive review, I am even less inclined to aim for the review that "will be most important to a book’s commercial success or failure."
You Might Also Like:
More from Conversational Reading: - To The Swift A little something to mull over with the Booker Prize longlist. Michael Holroyd in The Times: DURING MY CAREER AS A writer, the nature of...
- Soldiers of Salamis Since the “new” NYTBR debuted there’s been a rather intense game of racquetball around the blogs, in which the NYTBR has served as the ball....
- Audiobook Podcasting In a particularly forward-looking article, The Guardian argues that the future of audiobooks may lie in podcasting. Story is currently broadcasting his novel, Tom Corven,...
- Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell Invasion Begins The Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell reviews are coming fast and furious. The NYTimes and The Washington Post have allocated space in their Sunday book...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Leave a Reply
|
Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
|
Letter Killers Club by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
I’ve taught a course on bookreviewing where we look at these kinds of things. I would make the distinction in terms of perceived audience. However “general” The New Yorker and NYRB may be in comparison to academic journals, they still address themselves in their book reviews more clearly to the literati than to the average Joe or Joanne who’s just trying to figure out what book to read. The NYRB is not trying to appeal to the average reader but to the readers who will ultimately establish a book’s critical reputation. You’re right that it’s a first draft of literary history, but it is, by and large, this group or professional scholars, critics, and writers who establish the second draft of literary history as well.
There’s a great essay on this process by Richard Ohmann, “The Shaping of a Canon: American Fiction, 1960-1975.” It’s only available online via J-STOR and other proprietary databases, but there’s a decent summary of the argument here. Essentially Ohmann argues that the combination of appeals to more general literary readers by the NYT is the single most important factor in establishing a book’s status as a best-seller, while other reviews in places like NYRB establish it’s critical reputation since these are the reviews most read by English professors.
Peter,
I’d agree with a lot of what you say here, although I’ve long thought that the NYRB’s reputation of appealing to someone “above” the average reader just doesn’t make sense any more. Really, I don’t think the fiction coverage there is that much more complex than what you would find in a well-written Times review. (Maybe Ohmann covers this in his paper, but it says something that the NYRB was started in response to a prolonged absense of the NYTBR.)
Also, I think that the amount of fiction covered these days by the NYRB in particular (but also similar pages) would change its role as an establisher of critical reputations–from 1960 to 1975, the situation was different.
As for the role the NTY plays in making abook a best-seller: I’d be very surprised if a NYT review could make or break a book these days.
Yes, Ohmann may be pretty dated at this stage of the game. And I don’t know enough about publishing to know whether the NYTBR plays the same role it did for Ohmann–my guess is that massive publicity serves more to make or break a book in terms of sales than any particular review. Perhaps, too, viral publicity and other kinds of reviews on the web go further than word of mouth could possibly have done 25 years ago.
Still, you look at the NYTBR and they cover all kinds of things not touched by NYRB–genre fiction in mystery romance, chick lit, etcetera. And individual books are generally given reviews as to whether they are good or bad instances of that particular genre. The NYRB almost never even touches this kind of thing, and when it does it tends to be couched in a more cultural studies type of approach. What is the cultural significance of this genre and this particular instance of the genre? Not whether its a good or bad romance, or mystery, or western.
So I still think there’s an appeal being made to different readers, if only implicitly in what’s covered in the reviews themselves. The NYTBR tends to be more about what you should go out to get at your local Barnes and Noble next month. There’s some of that in NYRB, but to my mind the focus is more on an audience that wouldn’t be caught dead talking about the latest romance at a cocktail party. NYTBR is what English professors hope their graduates will bother to read after they graduate; NYRB is what professors display prominently on their desks to score points with their colleagues. Ha!
Perhaps its obvious that I subscribe–and prominently display–NYRB and Bookforum. NYTBR, alas, online only.