“I’ve worked in book reviews my whole life, so I’ve really had to fend off the books.”
Ann Kjellberg, the New York Review of Books veteran, to whom laughter comes easily, laughs as she says this, knowing all too well the impossibility of the task. “At a certain point,” she elaborates, “if you don’t have to pay for your books and you become overwhelmed by them, you begin to measure how much you haven’t read by how they surround you. But I still end up accumulating them. They’ve been pouring in. When we got the place, there was so much light, and I thought, ‘I’m not going to have one of these apartments where the books go up to the ceiling. I’m going to have light. I’m going to have space.’ But they’re all piled up on the floor.”
The place is Kjellberg’s garden apartment in the West Village, a spacious open-format wonder that feels of another era in today’s New York, a city whose literary denizens tend to hunker down in three-to-four-bedrooms with tiny common areas in ever further-flung neighborhoods of Brooklyn. It is, indeed, filled with light from the long raised skylights and two high windows in spite of the book piles that have been largely corralled, somewhat miraculously, in the northern quarter of the space—give or take, of course, some bathroom piles and, one imagines, a few more closed behind bedroom doors. It has the feel of an arts haven, paintings dotting the walls and a child’s watercolors featuring characters from the films of Hayao Miyazaki decorating the whitewashed bricks above an electronic keyboard that was certainly not there decades before, when it was the home of the composer John Cage and dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.
“John and Yoko lived in the similar next-door apartment,” Kjellberg said. “That exhausts all my tales, except that this eccentric crafts couple lived here before us. Supposedly they were pals with Dylan Thomas, and he would come here to dry out when he couldn’t make it home from the White Horse Tavern. Some literary Village lingers.”
It lingers, in part, thanks to Kjellberg. A few months later, the writers Jamaica Kincaid, Eliot Weinberger, and Geoffrey O’Brien and staffers from nearby New Directions Publishing, among others, filled the space as the guitarist Eve Silber, a Wednesday evening fixture at the White Horse and once a student of legendary 1960s folk singer Dave Van Ronk, the so-called Mayor of MacDougal Street, who paved the way for his friends Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, performed throughout the evening. Kincaid and O’Brien read from recent works, O’Brien from a piece he had written for Book Post, Kjellberg’s new project, a digital newsletter intended to bring the serious books criticism Kjellberg so cherishes into the digital era and to a broader readership.
“I had a fight with Roger Straus, who was a very impossible person,” she said. “I was uppity, you know? Roger did not want women to have opinions”
The task is daunting, but one for which Kjellberg was seemingly custom-made. During her years at Yale University in the 1980s, she interned for David Godine in Boston, and later for the Yale University Press, over the summer in an era before it was customary to hold a publishing internship before entering the industry. (“David still had a big printing press in the office at the time,” Kjellberg recalled.) After graduating, she sent her resume to publishers far and wide, and eventually Arthur Rosenthal, the founder of Basic Books, gave her what she considered novel advice.
“He said, ‘you should work in a bookstore while you’re looking for a job because nobody in publishing has done that,’” Kjellberg said. Back then, she explained, “you would get your kind of tweedy jacket and your entry-level publishing position. Sales and editorial didn’t speak to each other very much then, so people had very little feeling for the world in which people actually buy books. I got a great job working in a bookstore in Cambridge, in Harvard Square. It’s not as though working in a bookshop in Harvard Square is a blast of reality, but it was a fantastic time and gave me an abiding affection for independent bookselling.”
Kjellberg used her bookstore years to become more familiar with the kinds of books different houses actually published, and shortly thereafter secured an editorial assistantship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, where her starting salary was $9,000. That obviously wasn’t cutting it, so Kjellberg hired herself out to some of FSG’s writers as a typist. She ended up as Susan Sontag’s personal assistant and, later, worked for Joseph Brodsky, for whom she served as literary executor.
Kjellberg’s time at FSG was short-lived. “I had a fight with Roger Straus, who was a very impossible person,” she said. “I was uppity, you know? Roger did not want women to have opinions.” It was Straus’s loss, as Kjellberg proved her editorial eye in short order: Caryl Phillips’s The European Tribe was Kjellberg’s first acquisition for the publisher, and she discovered Katherine Davis from the slush pile, acquiring her debut, Labrador. Still, here dismissal was unceremonious, if ultimately fortunate.
“At Farrar, Straus—I don’t know if they still do this—they used close between Christmas and New Year’s, and Roger landed this piece of information on me as the office was closing for Christmas,” Kjellberg said. “By an incredibly fortunate series of events, I landed on my feet, and got a job with the New York Review of Books before they opened up again!”
At the Review, Kjellberg started in 1988 with “this sort of legendary job that people got working for Bob Silvers,” the Review’s cofounder with Barbara Epstein, “where he used to have four people kind of ranged around him.” Kjellberg was one of those four, where she served as something of a combination of researcher, typist, and editor.
“The books would come in, and the one piece of it that I stuck with through my many ensuing decades was the vetting of the books. I went through them all as they came in. I went through all the catalogs. I made a list of the ones that shouldn’t be missed, or the ones that he had to know about and decide against,” she said. This was in a pre-internet era, so Kjellberg would also head to the library to help writers research and fact-check their articles, as well as retype Silvers’ multiple edits of pieces on a typewriter. “You really internalized his way of editing and the whole kind of philosophy and spirit of it that way,” Kjellberg said.
Later, the editorial process was absorbed into the production process, so when a manuscript would come in, a group of typesetters Silvers called “the studio” took over that job, and Kjellberg was able to focus more on editing. And because Silvers and Epstein prioritized writers who were specialists in a certain field but not necessarily habituated to writing for a general audience, the pieces would often go through a lot of reworking. “These are probably not the names that you remember so much,” Kjellberg said. “It’s not like Janet Malcolm or Oliver Sacks required great do-overs.”
This was during a heady era for publishing, and especially for a place like the Review, where the areas of coverage were so wide-ranging. “I was there when the Wall fell, and during Tiananmen Square,” Kjellberg said. “And we had this party for Václav Havel, who was one of our writers, right after he became president of Czechoslovakia.” Competition, too, was fierce, and Kjellberg cited the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Nation, and the New Republic as forces in book reviewing at the time with which the Review maintained a healthy rivalry.
“It’s interesting that all of these places have changed dramatically except for the Review, which was sort of frozen by Bob and Barbara’s temperament throughout this entire run,” Kjellberg said. “I realize that the Nation has been under Katrina vanden Heuvel all this time, but everywhere else has undergone total transformations. Back then, in the days of Mr. Shawn, the New Yorker was more decorous, and seemed to be at pains not to look too argumentative or too intellectual—to feel like people’s living rooms rather than their libraries. But we fought with each other! The writers fought with other writers. There was a lot of fighting. We felt like they weren’t fighting at the New Yorker. That didn’t seem to be the tone. They were fighting at the New Republic.”
That said, Kjellberg doesn’t consider the Review’s intellectualism to be anathema to a broad readership. “I know that people think of the Review’s audience as being very heady—if you put the New York Review of Books on the coffee table in your movie, that just says something, right? But our consciousness in trying to edit it at the time was really the idea—even though this is perhaps a total fiction—that this could be read by any person, that it wouldn’t have a word in it that would only be understood by somebody who was trained in comparative literature, or physics, or something,” Kjellberg said. “You know the famous essay by Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’? His was the basic moral position of the Review: If you can’t explain an idea in a way that’s understandable to people, you’re probably trying to pull a fast one.”
“If you do not have people challenging ideas, challenging seriously worked-out ideas, then you are left with a sheep-like population”
With her new project, Book Post, Kjellberg hopes to extend that mission, albeit by publishing far shorter works of criticism than the longform behemoths that are the Review’s trademark. It’s been a challenge. A few years before leaving the Review in 2017, following Silvers’ death after a short illness, Kjellberg launched an annual literary magazine, Little Star. Shortly thereafter, Kjellberg worked with a Manhattan-based startup, 29th Street Publishing, to transform it into a magazine app. But magazine app readerships declined rapidly in the smartphone era, and 29th Street went out of business. Kjellberg shuttered the app and, after flirting with the idea of launching a Patreon for Little Star, entered into conversations with the newsletter startup Substack. She was one of their first clients although, she said, it took her too long to get going. She still had some details to work out in terms of what, exactly, she felt she needed to do.
“As Bob was getting sick, I was thinking more and more about how the country was divided into halves,” Kjellberg said. “In one half, the whole idea of reading or being educated was becoming more and more discredited. I read, for instance, some polling data about free college. Somebody went around and asked people all over the country what they thought of the idea of college being free. And a lot of people resisted it because they equated going to college with, like, being a lib.”
For Kjellberg, whose immigrant father was educated on the G.I. Bill after World War II and who watched Review authors like Elizabeth Hardwick embrace intense intellectualism as a direct response to upbringings devoid of anything of the sort, this was a tragedy she hoped to play her part in correcting. It’s not an easy task, she said, in an era in which publications are shifting away from criticism in favor of other books-related coverage that seems to operate by the principle laid out by the rabbit Thumper, so long ago, in the Disney film Bambi: “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all.”
Kjellberg, in contrast, places great value in an essay by Rebecca West, “A Duty of Harsh Criticism,” which describes the work of the serious critic as the front line of critical thinking. “If you do not have people challenging ideas, challenging seriously worked-out ideas, then you are left with a sheep-like population,” Kjellberg said. Which isn’t to say that she was looking to create Hatchet Job Daily. Kjellberg’s ideal is not harshness, but erudition and rigor. She wanted an audience that would not consist only of the New York critics, but, for instance, the “librarian who lives in Omaha who likes classical music.”
Eventually, Kjellberg said, she had her eureka moment. “Somehow, in the midst of Bob’s illness and the growing American division and the arrival of Substack, I suddenly thought, ‘Wait a minute: I’m not going to do a newsletter at Little Star. I’m gonna make a new kind of book review. That’ll be my plan.’ And I left the Review to do it.”
“The idea is partly that people get so much information out there. What I’m offering is a nice dollop in manageable increments of book life”
Book Post, a new kind of book review, launched last year, on a subscription model free of advertising. Kjellberg and an assistant, Victoria Uren, are its only staffers, although Kjellberg huddles with a digital marketing team for a couple of hours each week. All pieces are commissioned. The readership is small still, but Kjellberg hopes that, given time, her unique twist on the concept of a book review will draw in a wider readership. The trick is to get them to understand exactly what Kjellberg is doing—and that’s very different from the typical e-newsletter.
“I think there are sort of categories of newsletters: there are the ones that are diaristic, where people sign on because they love you and they just want to hear from you—and I’m supposed to be doing that, but I’m an editor! I can barely use the first person singular!” Kjellberg says, laughing. “And then there’s the kind of specialist model, where somebody knows something really special people will pay a lot to learn how to do—say, a certain kind of coding. But what I’m doing is more like a magazine in installments. There’s not really a precedent for it, and it’s a little hard to explain.”
Still, Kjellberg does her best to lay it out. Every few days, she said, an individual writer—Kincaid, or O’Brien, or Edward Mendelson, or April Bernard (disclosure: the author was a student of Bernard’s at Skidmore College)—writes a letter to subscribers reviewing or discussing a book they think readers should care about. “It’s not capacious, in that I’m not covering the whole spectrum of books,” Kjellberg said. “The idea is partly that people get so much information out there. What I’m offering is a nice dollop in manageable increments of book life.” There are traditional book reviews, but Kjellberg staggers her content, and also sends out some free newsletters, which alternate between reflective pieces by writers and pieces she writes about the book world.
This is very different, Kjellberg says, from the Review’s model, especially in terms of size.
“One of the founding ideas of the Review was to go long, and if you read this very snarky essay about the New York Times by Elizabeth Hardwick that Bob commissioned for Harper’s, ‘The Decline of Book Reviewing,’ she says that there’s no room in any of these book reviews to develop a serious idea,” Kjellberg explains. “Now, though, because there are no print constraints on how long people can go, there’s a lot of very undisciplined writing. You can’t ask people who you’re trying to bring into the culture to read 8,000-word pieces on everything. My pieces are much shorter. They’re only 700 words. I’m trying to make it easier to open the door—and I’ve actually found I have trouble writing that short myself. I know this is a cliché about the mobile audience, that people don’t pay attention and you can’t go on as long, but I think that that’s part of the editorial challenge: to try to give this world real ideas in a way that doesn’t ask people to commit so much of their time.”
“…for women, in academia particularly, to write a lot of critical reviews is bad for your career. Men, who are much more secure, could get away with doing these things”
It is natural, when discussing book criticism with a book critic, to ask her about how, exactly, she would advise would-be critics as they pursue their career. Kjellberg, when asked, wasn’t certain how to handle the question. While a fairly healthy discourse around books remains, in writing and on social media, this is not an era, she restated, of robust books criticism: “There are a dwindling number of places that are publishing reviews,” Kjellberg says, “and the question is, what’s the next thing? And I don’t know the answer.”
She does, however, have some thoughts, especially surrounding how difficult she found it for women in particular to break into that profession, at least at the Review. “I once wrote a really long piece, which I never published, in response to the VIDA stats about the New York Review,” she says, “and one of the things I wrote was that for women, in academia particularly, to write a lot of critical reviews is bad for your career. Men, who are much more secure, could get away with doing these things. The women would just turn down the assignments, if they didn’t like a book but that author was likely to consider them for a job, or they thought it likely that a harsh review was going to endanger their career. It was much harder to get women to write a review.” Elizabeth Hardwick, of course, being one major exception.
Ultimately, Kjellberg’s advice was true to her experience at the New York Review of Books—to look beyond the American market. “I don’t know how much of a market there will be in the future for the substantial, deeply-worked-over piece of criticism or nonfiction,” Kjellberg said, “but if one would like to develop that resume, a really good thing to do is learn or perfect a second language and spend some time getting to know that society. There is a relative paucity of writers doing substantive criticism in English for a general audience who have a real command of another language and culture.”
She added that those working in other forms of nonfiction besides literary criticism should be willing to focus on a discipline or subject area that others aren’t necessarily flocking toward. “If you are interested in foreign policy or international affairs, get to know one undercovered place really well, and pitch that,” she said. “If you have a general interest in humanities, develop a brief in a relatively under-covered field, like maybe architecture or archaeology. At the moment there is a boomlet, it seems to me, in voices from outside the metropolises in America, but I think there is still much to contribute there—If you come from a place with a relatively undercovered experience, study it, and speak from there.”
Or, of course, simply make your rounds in the West Village and hope you run into Ann Kjellberg. Be ready for a muscular, expansive discussion of literary culture. If you’re lucky, maybe she’ll commission a piece. Soon enough, your apartment will be overrun with piles of books too.
