I was talking to an editor of a major literary quarterly at a party recently. She was getting annoyed, she said, at the number of times she has been asked to publicly comment on the “death” of the American short story and give quotes for newspaper articles on why “nobody” reads short stories anymore. She spends sixty hours a week thinking about the American short story, she said. Why would they ask HER why “nobody” cares about the very thing she has made her career? How would she know?
The same thing happens to book reviewers. The death of newspaper book review sections mirrors the downfall of the print newspaper in general. Ever more squeezed for cash and desperate for ad dollars, book sections have been jettisoned as dead weight: either cut entirely or shrunk down dramatically. Many hand-wringing articles can be read, in which major book critics discuss the death of the book review and try to determine why “nobody” cares. Book reviewers will never know the answer to this question. Because we DO care.
I, for one, don’t believe that the book review has died. Two things have happened, though: first of all, the most lively discussions of literature in a public forum now happen online rather than in the paper. And also, for the most part, the people who do the writing of the reviews don’t do it as their sole source of income — many of the best are passionate amateurs, not unlike the Pushcart Prize anthology staff. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a passionate amateur lover of literature, but it sure freaks the hell out of the newsprint-bound old guard, who really enjoyed their century of being the sole arbiter of literary merit. Author Richard Ford famously dismissed book blogs (which he has never read) as “some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute”. Michael Dirda of the Washington Post commented that authors would much rather be reviewed in a major paper than “on a website by someone who uses the moniker NovelGobbler”. The world of books and book reviewing is not dying or dead, by any means, but it is changing, and what the literary world will look like in the 21st century will be entirely different from how it looked in the 20th. It isn’t book criticism that has died: the subscriber-driven major print daily newspaper is what died, and thanks to the internet, the book review needn’t depend just on that one forum for its existence.
The National Book Critics Circle, the organization of professional book reviewers, has their annual meeting this week (January 10-12, 2008) right here in San Francisco. By professional, it means “in print.” Often controversial, always thought-provoking podcaster and critic Edward Champion is running for NBCC board. Extension of membership to litbloggers is one of the major planks in his platform. It’ll be interesting to see how he does. [CORRECTION: The NBCC is open to print and online reviewers. 1/10/08]
At the January 12th meeting, the organization will vote on NBCC award finalists, and it will host a series of free, open-to-the-public events and discussions about the future of literature. These events will culminate in the announcement of the finalists for this year’s National Book Critics Circle Award. If winning the National Book Award is like getting an Oscar, then getting an NBCC award is like winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes: artistic merit and formal experimentation are prized. The voting is a complicated process. The long-lists of ten prospective nominees (either chosen by a committee or voted onto the list by members) are winnowed down to five books in each of six categories: fiction, general nonfiction, biography, memoir, criticism, and poetry. The NBCC board will vote on the shortlist at their meeting in San Francisco, and the finalists in each category will be announced in a public ceremony at City Lights Bookstore at 6pm that evening. I imagine a team of exhausted Book Critics staggering out into the evening after long rounds of voting and defending their votes, like Iowans at a caucus.