“In America, now, oblivion, literary failure, obscurity, neglect—all the great moments of artistic tragedy and misunderstanding—still occur, but the natural conditions for the occurrence are in a curious state of camouflage, like those decorating ideas in which wood is painted to look like paper and paper to look like wood. A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised. Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory.”
–Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” 1959
Last month, Harper’s published a lengthy essay by literary critic Christian Lorentzen entitled “Like This Or Die: The Fate of the Book Review in the Age of the Algorithm.” At a (frankly indefensible) 7,800 words, it’s a tough read, but an interesting one, in which Lorentzen argues that arts and culture journalists have become “drunk on the gush,” that the review as a primary mode of engagement has become outdated, and that because books coverage now lives or dies on social media, “the basic imperatives of the review—analysis and evaluation—are being abandoned in favor of a nodding routine of recommendation.”
Every modern incarnation of the book-reviewing-is-dying lament can be traced back to patron saint of acerbic book critics Elizabeth Hardwick’s seminal 1959 essay (also published in the pages of Harper’s), “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which was an early inspiration for the founding of the New York Review of Books, and in which Hardwick took aim at what she saw as the dismal state of American literary criticism. Oft-imitated, though never bettered, every decade or so another exhaustive and impassioned piece in this vein is published, and the literary community attempts to separate the hard truths from the hand-wringing.
So what, exactly, are we talking about this time around? Is relentlessly sunny book “coverage” replacing honest book criticism, or merely supplementing it? Are listicles, Bookstagram, and literary Twitter nothing but treacly promotion puddles on the surfaces of which books can float unscrutinized and unchallenged; or are they in fact vibrant and necessary new arenas of discourse wherein previously silenced critical voices can finally be heard? Has the age of the algorithm truly killed the intellectually rigorous book review?
As a website primarily dedicated to spotlighting book reviews, in all their myriad forms, we at Book Marks are intensely interested in the answers to these questions, and so we reached out to our friends in the critical community to see what they had to say about Lorentzen’s essay and the state of book criticism in general.
-Dan Sheehan, Book Marks editor
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Of all the things book reviewers have to worry about these days, Christian Lorentzen’s nostalgia for a time that never was seems the least of them. Book reviewing for mass media like newspapers and magazines has always had a symbiotic relationship with the publishing industry, and readers of those book reviews have always been consumers—well-read consumers, but still. I started reviewing books for newspapers 35 years ago, and if the Shangri-La of intellectual purity Lorentzen imagines ever existed, it was then already long gone. With the internet, as it does, changing everything from our once-treasured gatekeeper status to the delivery system for our work, and with newspaper and magazine space for books coverage withering like dry grass in a wildfire, fretting over readers of book reviews who want to be entertained seems like yelling at them to get off our lawn.
–Colette Bancroft, The Tampa Bay Times
My feeling about the Harper’s piece is that it is an eloquent sally against a state of affairs that doesn’t actually exist in book criticism. As far as I can tell, the argument takes some interesting turns but essentially boils down to the idea that there aren’t enough intellectually rigorous (that is, negative) book reviews. And that just seems false! I’ve probably read a dozen blistering, look-through-my-fingers pans so far this year, and dozens more polite putdowns. Beyond that lies a more subjective territory. Lorentzen, presumably reading many of the same people I’m reading, is lamenting the heat-death of criticism while a lot of writers I know are seeing a Big Bang.
There’s a separate issue here, which is the gutting of arts journalism and journalism more generally. That seems like the more relevant problem, although the ravaging of culture budgets is not always obvious from the quality and opulence of what’s out there. The stuff about Alex and Wendy, those imaginary, algorithm-entranced consumers, is entertaining, and perceptive enough about a specific niche of literary coverage, but, to my mind, the essay overstates both readers’ appetite for fluff and its prominence. Beyond that: Do some people seek out books that confirm their social identities, and has it always been thus? Yes. Is it happening more now because lorem ipsum social media something something performativity? Maybe! I would rate this essay four stars and recommend it to fans of The Sopranos, Spoon, and the Tom Dixon french press.
–Katy Waldman, The New Yorker
I’m pleased this essay exists even if I disagree with a good chunk of it—any piece that generates spirited conversation around book criticism and coverage at this point ought to be appreciated. And I get where Lorentzen is coming from: I’m a huge believer in the book review as the standard-bearer for an accessible but robust literary culture, imperfect as it may be. It’s something I’ve worked hard to preserve in my time at EW: a books section that offers serious, considered treatments of significant titles. The doom-and-gloom of the essay seems misplaced, however. I actually happen to agree with its critique of “positive-only” book coverage—“Who cares what you think if your every word is a compliment?” puts it nicely, if sharply—but it reads extreme to me. Does a negative review have worth today? Absolutely. What’s a literary culture without a little tastemaking and disagreement? But today’s book critic plays the role of curator, too: The decision of what to review is equally significant. Speaking for a general magazine, what’s the point of panning a disappointing debut that the vast majority of your audience doesn’t—and has no reason to—know of? A big advance acquisition or adaptation deal changes that equation some, sure, but so many new authors are fighting for so little space every single week. To prioritize the books that deserve to find an audience, that merit a critical analysis, that are contributing positively and uniquely to the literary landscape isn’t “nice.” It’s a sound editorial decision.
The “lists” Lorentzen so strongly opposes are concerning, as is the impact of social media on nuanced criticism. That said, he ignores the huge difference between outlets in terms of approach. With some the lists do feel hyperbolic and driven by hype, as he claims; with others, there’s a strong curation and recommendation system that creates a meaningful, accessible entry into the world of books today. That ought to be celebrated—and encouraged.
–David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
This is my starting point: The average American reads whatever dismal number of books per year, and the rest of us are just trying our best out here, to share our opinions and our love for books, hoping that somebody cares. Do I love that books live and die by their packaging, by their buzz potential, their listability? No, of course I don’t. I have a book coming out this year, and I’m acutely aware of the importance of preview lists. I’m planning to claw my way onto them even though I worry that they only amplify books that are already being pushed by publishers, and make it harder for books to stand out that aren’t anointed in advance. The more it takes for a book to find a reviewer who will actually read the damn thing, the less important it is that the sentences are beautiful, that the storytelling is assured, that the book is, well, a good book. That said! I don’t think there’s anything wrong with cheerleading, not when there are so many wonderful books to talk about, not when there’s a chance that people might be listening. It’s not like book critics have stopped doing the work of criticism.
–Steph Cha, Los Angeles Times/USA Today
Book reviewing is expensive. I know, because I am the books editor of one of those “small-town Sunday ‘Book Pages’” that Christian Lorentzen (through the words of Elizabeth Hardwick) mocks. It’s expensive to mail ARCs and finished books all over the country to critics; it’s expensive to pay critics; it’s expensive to devote pages in the Sunday newspaper (as well as space during the week) to book reviews; it’s expensive (though not nearly expensive enough, I would maintain) to pay my salary. Book coverage brings in almost no advertising money: bookstores are operating on a thin margin and cannot afford to buy ads in the Sunday paper, and as far as I know book publishers have never bought ads here in fly-over country, even when things were flush, which they definitely are not now.
Newspapers, as you might have read, have no money to spare these days.
So yes, some newspapers have cut back or dispensed with reviews. But they are trying to keep books coverage going in other ways—profiles, Q&As, lists. This, I think, is a good thing. It doesn’t seem to me to signal the fall of civilization, but the contraction of newspapers. They are to be applauded for continuing books coverage in whatever way they can afford.
At my paper, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, we persevere, and it’s because of readers. Readers of books—all books, all kinds of books—and readers of the newspaper. I don’t curate these pages for anyone else. Not authors, not publishers, not the literary elite, not the critics themselves. I curate for the wide range of readers out in the world.
And so we review high literary and books in translation and poetry and memoir and history and populist novels and mysteries and children’s books and biographies and books about climate change and books published by tiny presses. Would Lorentzen have us stop at “high literary”? Readers come in all stripes, and offering a wide array of reviews and profiles and Q&As and lists (or listicles) is a way to draw more attention to books, a way to offer more variety and attract the attention and interest of readers to books they might want to read.
Are book reviews drying up? Is the world of serious criticism shrinking? It seems to me that, actually, the world of book reviews is expanding. There are readers everywhere, of all kinds. They all deserve to know what books are out there that might be of interest. We do our best to reach them all.
–Laurie Hertzel, Star Tribune/National Book Critics Circle President
“Ours is an age that cherishes consensus,” writes Christian Lorentzen in “Like This or Die.” I wish I could merit my critical laurels by finding it in myself to say something disputatious—but I can only prove Lorentzen right by voicing my assent. Of course, there are minor bones to pick. Lorentzen attributes the uptick in “review inflation” to the commercial pressures that push critics to become recommendation-machines, emitting low-level keens of positivity like elevators blasting background Muzak. One thing he omits is how we, denizens of the industry, are also failing each other. The self-promotion we are all-but forced to practice is partially the fault of a world in which we compete for pittances, but angry critics on Twitter play no small role in forcing consensus.
In any case, the hardships precipitated by publishing, in its current iteration, are relatively new. But how unprecedented is the devolution of criticism into phatic pap? “Without something to hate,” wrote the English essayist William Hazlitt in his 1826, “we should lose the very spring of thought and action.” Sixty-one years later, Friedrich Nietzsche suggested that the milquetoast champions of Judeo-Christian commendations could benefit from “a bit of meanness, a bit of gloominess.” He goes so far as to recommend a dash of paper. I agree with Nietzsche’s dietary prescriptions, but I don’t think the present is any less peppery than the past. Lorentzen acknowledges that he is one of many critics to criticize criticism. (He cites not Hazlitt and Nietzsche but more recent predecessors, most notable among them supremely spicy Elizabeth Hardwick.) The preponderance of what is produced at any given time is mediocre filler. Critics and the general public, overexposed to recent work, are habitual overraters. How could it be otherwise?
“The novel is a durable form, no matter how many time its death has been declared,” writes Lorentzen. The novel is not dead—not even moribund—because novels have only ever seriously interested a small but fiercely interested (and fiercely quarrelsome) group of marginal weirdos. Their survival does not depend on their capacity to command a mass audience but rather on their capacity to captivate cachetic devotees. Criticism, too, is a durable form. Its best practitioners, perverse lovers of hating, have always constituted an embittered, embattled minority. And aren’t we at least lucky to live at a time when there’s so much to loathe?
–Becca Rothfeld, The Times Literary Supplement
I sympathize with many of this essay’s arguments. The lists, cults of likability, and what Wesley Morris calls monocriticism in his essay “The Morality Wars” eclipse the many wildly talented, hardworking critics writing capacious reviews, contributing to an artform unto itself, for little to no compensation, for the love of it. Writers and readers do deserve more. But these types of essays, which seem to bubble up in every genre, feel like a mourning of a loss of certain power dynamics rather than an interrogation of those dynamics overall. The nostalgia’s the point, but there’s never been a meritocracy or truly robust system of doing things to lose. I think the essay identifies varied symptoms to the greater dilemma that our overlapping industries—publishing, journalism, media, higher education—are collapsing. I know, I know—cue the eye rolls—but here we are: late stage capitalism. The ‘age of plenty’ belies layers of scarcity. One of the many things in the upheaval we are going through and likely to be going though for decades, reevaluating our relationship to major pillars of our society—the environment, healthcare, education, criminal justice—is how we value arts and culture. Art is necessary to make meaning of life and critics are necessary to make meaning of art. The questions of how much we value art and who creates it are central, and we’re not discussing enough what it would mean to make decisions about it. Or transform the decisions that have already been made rather than simply react to harmful trends and pivots. This whole enterprise has only ever worked for a select few. Let’s be honest about that much in keeping with the spirit of contextualization this essay invokes. A return to more book reviews, less book coverage, wouldn’t suffice as any kind of meaningful change.
I don’t know enough, but this WGA action is something: rather than lament the dominance of the TV writer’s capital in our culture compared to the literary writer, maybe we should stand with them. It seems they are collectively experiencing what people of color and other marginalized communities have long known—if our predatory society can extract labor and culture, our food, our fashion, our practices, our stories, from its people without having to value the lives of these same people, these innovators and artists, it will. I’ve seen some discussion of universal basic income, but there must be others ideas. We need to be rooted in the specifics of our fields, all of us creators and critics, and also interdisciplinary and intersectional in our work for something better for all of us, surely a demand beyond the scope of one essay. Still, the most telling line of the piece might just be “editors…trying to keep their jobs.” The poverty of our discourse is a reflection of the poverty of our civil society. Folks are just trying to eat. Meanwhile, who does it serve to only ever talk about being compensated for creation of culture as a privilege, as great art coming from suffering? What does it keep us from imagining? Let’s be granular in our analysis, but also expansive in our synthesis of ideas, a hallmark of our best criticism.
–Leena Soman, various/2018 NBCC Emerging Critic
A year and a half ago, as part of its Secrets of the Book Critics series, Book Marks asked for my thoughts on book criticism in the age of social media. I focused on the positive: Although the number of venues in which to publish book criticism has diminished, the diversity of voices has increased. But let’s get back to that bit about the diminishing number of venues. This has had many unfortunate effects, one of which is that the remaining book sections have had to adapt in order to survive, perhaps in ways that their editors would have preferred to avoid. I suspect a big reason one sees more listicles and Q&As these days, as Lorentzen notes in his essay, and fewer works of long, thoughtful criticism is the same reason that one sees designer soaps, stuffed animals, and latte macchiatos in bookstores: to attract an audience. Lifestyle features and other puff pieces are the latte macchiatos of the literary world. People seem to like them. Sometimes, they hit the spot. But I worry that, if we’re not careful, all that froth will soon be the only thing on the menu.
–Michael Magras, Star Tribune/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As I read it, Lorentzen’s essay is responding to three separate but related issues: first, the declining market for book reviews; second, the rise of a kind of fetishizing of the book as a physical object (Bookstagram, journalistic coverage of book illustrations, even the hysteria over the erroneous idea that Marie Kondo wanted everyone to get rid of their books); and third, the rise of list-focused book coverage devoted to recommendation over analysis. Lorentzen’s essay responds to all three issues with a near-apocalyptic despair, but I personally despair only at the first. When it comes to the latter two, I am optimistic.
All of these issues are linked by the problem of the novel’s status in public life. While the novel used to be widely considered the art form that was best able to express the modern condition and hence the one that was most important for everyone to follow, today, the novel is considered much less central to the culture, and first film and now TV has largely taken its place. We see the remnants of its former high status in the way we venerate the book as object—hence Bookstagram, etc.—but we also don’t pay all that much attention to the contents of books, hence the declining market for book reviews and the scrambling to replace them with list-focused coverage. (I can certainly confirm that book reviews get the least traffic of probably any other kind of writing I do, and as book coverage goes lists do comparatively well—but on a purely personal note, I hate writing lists because I don’t write about any book without reading it first, and the amount of labor that goes into reading enough to build a list is appalling.)
As a book critic, I think that books continue to do work that no other artform can do: they express what is happening on the inside of our minds with more clarity and more beauty than any other medium can manage. (And, not for nothing, but novels are a perfect medium for our epistolary age. Kelsey McKinney has a really thoughtful newsletter issue delving into this argument.) I also agree with Lorentzen that well-written book reviews are one of the most meaningful and effective ways that exist to write about books. A decent book review can unpack what is compelling or what fails in a given book; a good book review can help generate an aesthetic theory that helps readers make sense of how to approach books in general; a great book review is a work of art in and of itself.
But I disagree that the other two methods he outlines are invalid. Criticism should not only be evaluation or recommendation, but it’s not anti-intellectual or wrong for readers to want recommendations or to enjoy curated lists. And contra Lorentzen, readers who want recommendations and curations manifestly do exist and do deserve to read writing that will serve them (although again, my god, the time and the labor that goes into a list!). And if a book is being fetishized as a cultural object, that fetishization deserves attention and analysis. What are we projecting onto the book as object? What do they symbolize to us? What are covers putting onto their books to try to attract our attention right now, and how effective are they? Let’s not forget that millennial pink was first spotted on the oft-Instagrammed cover of Sweetbitter.
What is worrisome is when our attention to the book-as-object and our list-building and curating completely overwhelms literary criticism. And that fear is clearly and very reasonably personal for Leorentzen, who writes that he was dropped from his contract at New York magazine after it chose to expand its books coverage but limit its traditional review coverage. I have to sympathize: that’s an awful tradeoff. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a terrible betrayal of the tribe for, say, the New York Times Book Review to devote a column to thinking about book covers, or to think about whether some books are better served by non-critical coverage. Ways of thinking about books that are not reviews are not monstrous or wicked, even if I do selfishly think that they are often less interesting and less valuable than a straightforward review.
And focusing on the review above all else will not restore the novel to its old place at the center of American cultural life. Those days are past, and no amount of book reviewing will bring them back. The best we can do is to keep thinking and writing about books, relentlessly and endlessly, as much as we possibly can.
–Constance Grady, Vox
The role of the critic is changing in 2019, just as the role of the novelist was changing in 1996 when Jonathan Franzen asked, also in Harper’s, “why bother?” Both men lament the supposed decline of public hunger for rigor and depth, albeit across different forms. For as long as we keep reading books, this rhetorical move isn’t going anywhere. Something old and noble will always be at risk of dying. I certainly agree with some of what Lorentzen says—the standard book review is an “unsatisfying form.” I think readers deserve better than 1000 words of surface-scratching, a conviction that fuels the work I put into the world. For that same reason, though, I also agree with what I imagine is a partial impetus behind expanding “books coverage”: there are other compelling ways to get people engaging with interesting ideas.
No, I don’t always feel like reading Q&As or profiles (though those can do their part in stimulating sharp conversation, as when we learn, for example, that the stack on a novelist’s nightstand is conspicuously homogenous). But nor do I think that they signal a total surrender to “Alex and Wendy,” the fictional couple in “Like This or Die.” There’s still room for rigorous analysis within that ecosystem. Of course, there’s more noise to compete with now—so do better. Find ways to be both serious and engaging. That’s what the essay is for—a form I was surprised to see mentioned fewer than a dozen times. That absence feels, to me, like the piece misses much of what’s going on, and what’s interesting, in contemporary literary journalism. Essays can do the work of reviews while being more flexible, challenging, and outward-facing. They’re places of surprise, of delight, of showmanship. They’re attentive to politics, history, narrative, pleasure. The better among them are unthreatened by the list or “the algorithm.” They provide sites of contact (and conflict) for readers, writers, and critics. And isn’t that the point of what we’re all doing here?
–Tajja Isen, various
I’m not sure the book review is outdated as Lorentzen suggests; however, I do think the US publishing model is outdated, but that’s another debate. Sure, there are too many dumb listicles, too much opinion and not enough analysis, too much snark (and I daresay it occurs in the Harper’s piece in parts), and nods to the “popular and commercial” that he is skeptical about, but so what if it gets people to read? Let’s not judge what they read by putting a boot on their neck or we will lose them altogether. So in that way, I’m glad for the online book clubs, the Instagram feeds, the brassy book covers that look cool in your online cart.
Besides that, I’m not exactly sure what this article says: that book reviews are an unsatisfying form? (I disagree; I learn more in book reviews than sometimes reading the book!). Is it saying that book reviewers are being too “nice”? (Why bother reviewing a book if it stinks, I say. It will fall to the bottom of the heap by inaction on my part). And why are we bringing up Franzen as the fall guy again? (He is one of the most generous authors I have met. Leave. Him. Alone).
I do agree there is some bad book review writing out there, clichés and all, and not every critic examines a book with dexterity and good verbs. True enough, we don’t have time to read as much as we’d like and that content vampires are lurking all around. But book criticism is necessary to the conversation of storytelling, and in stories are the world. As long as I’m around, book criticism is not taking the graceless path. I don’t work for the Wendys and Alexes of the world, but I do seek to give them information.
–Kerri Arsenault, NBCC Criticism Chair
When I became the book editor for a regional newspaper in 1998, I had a colleague who was so concerned that human contact might influence his book reviews, he skipped parties that authors might attend. He dodged author interviews and public appearances. A superb critic, he was (and is) all about the book. Today, for better or worse, the digital tools we work with have cracked that shell. The internet has enabled the wide circulation of Christian Lorentzen’s valuable and much-discussed piece, but it’s the same ravenous beast that demands listicles; author/celebrity worship; books coverage that tilts towards fan-friendly television criticism. In one sense, this sort of coverage testifies to the fact that people still love books. That’s good, right? We bookish types are no longer hidden away in the stacks or the study; our minds and opinions are linked across borders and around the globe. But book writers are frequently competing for the same eyeballs—in the back of any critic’s mind lurks the question of whether their piece gets clicks or goes viral (in a modest book sort of way) on Twitter, an entirely relevant question for people trying to make a living at book criticism.
To remain honest, we have to remember who we are writing for. For the author, of course, but finally, it’s for the reader. Investing the time in reading a book is a serious commitment, and critics owe it to the reader to be candid, because if you are not, readers will lose faith in your ability to be fair. This is the toughest challenge for a critic today, maintaining a kind of tough love for books that will keep us from slipping into what Elizabeth Hardwick, in 1959, described as “a sort of democratic euphoria that may do the light book a service but will hardly meet the needs of a serious work.” Or the needs of its reader.
–Mary Ann Gwinn, Seattle Times/Newsday
One: Agent provacateurs function by creating a cliff and then creating a wave of panic that we have fallen off it, or are about to fall off it, or in the middle of falling off it. Depending on what the agent provocateur wants to be recognized for and the amount of courage possessed, the cliff may be pitched close to cultural issues—from the violently triggering to the seemingly benign. Let the agents provoke. The wave will fade. There will be a lull, then another one, an eddy of responses. There are things far more real, more pressing than the circus.
Two: Tangentially, this issue I consistently find thrust into the literary community that “[insert aspect of literature] is dead” or that there is something deeply at fault with either the creator or consumer of art, seems a lament for a time when literature was not as diverse and inclusive—a nostalgia for literature and readership that privileges the white (male) heteronormative gaze and experience. This negates the extremely important work being done in all forms of literature by writers and readers of color as well as from other traditionally marginalized backgrounds.
–Hope Wakube, various
In “Like This Or Die,” his catchy dirge on the annihilation of book reviewing by a thousand algorithms, Chris Lorentzen pays tribute to Elizabeth Hardwick. Same magazine, same subject—hers “The Decline of Book Reviewing”—50 years apart. He wants to be Hardwick. While the image of Lorentzen red-ringleted, of gauzy scarf and Southern accent, gives screeching pause, a Hardwick reprisal is always a pleasure. Chris rightly avails himself of her scorn for mushy “[r]eadability, a cozy little word,” her conviction that “the lengthy, the intransigent, and above all, the interesting, should expect to find their audience” (though maybe not as lengthy as “Like This Or Die”), and her elegant impatience with book reviewing constricted by the new-and-not-improved attention span of the television era. (Lizzie kept her set on non-stop, however, during the Watergate hearings.) At his best, Lorentzen is what Lizzie intended the future to be. His reactionary fidgets, she’d call him out on.
But, unlike Lorentzen, Lizzie didn’t disdain journalistic books coverage, not so long as it stood distinct from book reviewing, and the reportage, author profiles, and publishing news were up to her Kentucky snuff. Those high, intoxicating standards were present at the creation of The New York Review of Books, which wasn’t all reviews or always about books, and produced writers and readers who changed what it meant to be either. (Why Lizzie’s name abruptly disappeared from the masthead following Robert Silvers’s death could use a little sleuthing.)
Lizzie’s exacting approach to literary endeavor and forward thinking couldn’t stem the no-culture tide that is now Lorentzen’s to deplore for lapping at his ankles, the Internet gush urging culture into an entertainment blob. Yet thanks to her high-spirited demands, so much remains above water, including the purposeful resistance of “Like This or Die.” Refuse to drown in the big blob, she’d say, and do, hopping a Checker from her book-lined block of West 67th Street, off to esoteric musicales and low-down diversions.
She wanted to pursue possibilities. Lorentzen prefers to bat them away, soured to the Internet’s opportunities by its Lowest-Common-Denominator disappointments. So, Chris? You’re disillusioned by publications kow-towing to algorithms and hamster-wheeling the news? Start something new, known as a web site, which, if you’re reading this one, you must concede can be on par. The decimation of arts, culture and book sections, cut loose by mainstream media, both print and online? Replace them. Take the high road from Hopkinton. Start a new New York Review. Meet Lizzie’s standards.
The final obstacle isn’t just the algorithms Lorentzen meets up with on the Internet, their happy-talking, stupefying homogeneity cheerfully spreading intellectual blight. It’s where he goes with them. Blaming them for bloating and emptying cultural discourse at the same time, he takes the architectural liberty of conflating the big blob with the big-tent idea of culture. Instead of limiting varieties of cultural expression, however, he should muster opposition to any tent not poled by the highest critical and creative standards. Contrary to his shrinking response, there are more than enough supremely qualified writers to fill areas once restricted to a pale male canon, lookalike gatekeepers of the culture club. The unmitigated resemblance of one to the other, mirrors to mirrors, isn’t good for the eyesight. It’s the reason they’re clueless about where, quite specifically, to locate these talents, and incapable of seeing the singular in each and every one. A reprisal of William F. Buckley (or Sam Tanenhaus, for that matter) isn’t going to save us. “I met [Isaac] Fitzgerald around that time at a party, and I’m fond of him,” Lorentzen writes. “His pro-book policies seemed harmless….” Keep him away from Gabrielle Bellot. Bring back John Leonard.
–Celia McGee, New York Times/National Book Review
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Kerri Arsenault is the Book Review Editor for Orion magazine and Criticism Chair of the National Book Critics Circle
Colette Bancroft is the Book Editor at the Tampa Bay Times
David Canfield is an Associate Editor at Entertainment Weekly
Steph Cha is an author, as well as a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and USA Today
Constance Grady is a culture critic and staff writer for Vox.com
Mary Ann Gwinn is a Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Critics Circle board member, and former Book Editor of the Seattle Times
Laurie Hertzel is Senior Editor for Books at the Star Tribune and the President of the National Book Critics Circle
Tajja Isen is an editor and critic whose work has appeared in Longreads, BuzzFeed, The Globe and Mail, Broadly, and elsewhere
Michael Magras is a freelance book critic who writes regularly for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Star Tribune, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle
Celia McGee‘s first job out of college was cat-sitting for Elizabeth Hardwick. Her second was at the New York Review of Books
Becca Rothfeld is an essayist and critic whose reviews have appeared in The Nation, The TLS, Bookforum,The New Republic and elsewhere
Leena Soman Navani is a 2018 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critic, whose work has been featured in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere
Hope Wabuke is a poet, essayist, writer, and board member of the National Book Critics Circle
Katy Waldman is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a former staff writer at Slate
