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Secret Workings of the NYTBR Revealed!
Well, not quite that thrilling, but there is some useful info here.
The part I find most interesting is that the Book Review "winnows down" from 1,000 books per week. I don’t know how common this is, but I submit that if a large amount of the time of you and your assistant editors is spent tossing out books you’re not interested in reviewing, then you’re losing out on time that could be well spent making the Book Review a better product.
Again, for all I know this is SOP at all major papers nationwide, but it would seem that they could find a better way to pick books, or at least a better way to get rid of the books they don’t want to review.
Also, I’ve really got to say, if they actually do run through 1,000 titles per week, it’s amazing how few substantially interesting books make it to their pages.
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- Loathing the NYTBR Over at LitKicks, Levi writes As I draw the last thin gray page closed with a sigh of appreciation, I’d like to take a moment...
- Vollmann in NYTBR Vollmann’s been tapped by Tanenhaus for a review of Exit A by Anthony Swofford. Vollmann is not pleased. “Imagine my satisfaction,” reads the Scribner publicity...
- Salvayre in NYTBR Well, I guess it’s something of a victory that a book by Lydie Salvayre gets reviewed in the NYTBR. Unfortunately, the review is pretty blah....
- Authors Rebel Against Crappy NYTBR Reviews Not only bloggers can dis the Times’s bad reviews: But these guys are just a warmup act. The viciousness really begins with David Thomson, who...
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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.
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Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
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 submit that if a large amount of the time of you and your assistant editors is spent tossing out books you’re not interested in reviewing, then you’re losing out on time that could be well spent making the Book Review a better product.”
So, the product could be improved by *limiting* its scope?
No Sebastian. Let me try to explain this to you. There are better and worse ways to find books for your book review. Shuffling through the 1,000 books that are randomly sent to you every week sounds inefficient and rather narrow to me. (What about the publishers that can’t afford to send books? What about the publishers that choose not to? What about the books that are tossed out before they even reach the editors? Why only let a small circle of a few editors pick the books week after week after week?) I think there are much better ways to pick books, ways in which the NYTBR can both be more efficient and that widen its scope.