[HN Gopher] Is it the "New York Review of Each Other's Books"? ___________________________________________________________________ Is it the "New York Review of Each Other's Books"? Author : Jerry2 Score : 84 points Date : 2022-04-27 19:00 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (danielstone.substack.com) (TXT) w3m dump (danielstone.substack.com) | AndyMcConachie wrote: | It's only as incestuous as academia :) | gxqoz wrote: | "Wow, who is this Ralph Manheim guy I've never heard of and why | is NYRB obsessed with him?" Oh, apparently he's a translator. | layer8 wrote: | Translators rarely get the credit they deserve, so it's kinda | nice to see this. :) | FatalLogic wrote: | 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 | hkt wrote: | 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). | car_analogy wrote: | 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. | coldtea wrote: | It is the public media culture of scatching each other's back | cafard wrote: | The National Lampoon once did a "New York Review of Us" issue. | (https://magazineparody.com/2018/01/28/national-lampoon-parod... | says that this was in January 1976.) | bhouston wrote: | 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.) | notacoward wrote: | Don't similar "revolving doors" exist in just about every | industry, including tech? | michaelt wrote: | 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. | Finnucane wrote: | 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. | freddyym wrote: | A large portion of blurb quotes come from people who haven't | read the book... [0] | | 0 https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-9/in-the-beginning- | wa... | 21723 wrote: | Semi-troll, semi-serious question. | | 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. | not2b wrote: | 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. | 21723 wrote: | 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. | ilamont wrote: | 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. | zoolily wrote: | 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. | browningstreet wrote: | 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. | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | 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." | zwieback wrote: | 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. | 21723 wrote: | 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. | mbg721 wrote: | How is the book market huge, if there aren't any readers? Do | you mean that books produced in the US are widely exported? | 21723 wrote: | 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. | | ---- | | [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. | mbg721 wrote: | 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? | JumpCrisscross wrote: | National identity, culture and distribution. | | 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.) | SeanLuke wrote: | But plumbing is largely a zero sum game. Book sales are not: | this makes an enormous difference. | 21723 wrote: | 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. | Finnucane wrote: | >Publishers choose a priori which books are going to be | bestsellers | | Oh, if only we knew how to do that! | 21723 wrote: | 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. | returningfory2 wrote: | 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. | setgree wrote: | 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]. | | [0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/ | | [1] | https://twitter.com/30_rock_quotes/status/7699430022?lang=en | | [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. | danadannecy wrote: | 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. | briga wrote: | 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. | shreyshnaccount wrote: | 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 | 21723 wrote: | 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. | | ---- | | [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. | whatshisface wrote: | > _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. | 21723 wrote: | Brutal, but not entirely false. | | There is something to be said for writing a book that | people claim to have read, though. | shreyshnaccount wrote: | That makes a lot of sense | starwind wrote: | > 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? | | Uh, I don't see the difference | frereubu wrote: | 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. | starwind wrote: | Oh OK that makes sense. I thought "part of the club" as in | "club of high profile authors" | jgalt212 wrote: | How come directors don't write movie reviews, but book authors | commonly write book reviews? | bobthechef wrote: | swatcoder wrote: | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-27 23:00 UTC)