[HN Gopher] Is it the "New York Review of Each Other's Books"?
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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.
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