NYTBR Goes To Red And Thirsty Hell In a Handbasket

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My and everybody's two favorite book blogs, Bookslut and Complete Review, were awash today with indignation about the New York Times Book Review's decision to cut literary fiction coverage even FURTHER so they have more space for nonfiction and all those books you see in airports.
I expected there'd be a thread where everyone could vent, so I thought I'd start one.
Recently Terry Teachout wrote a column talking about the '50s culture of middlebrow--the idea that the "crass middle class" had a sort of dumbfounded sense of responsibility toward find art, classical music, lit, etc. which led them to at least value books in ways that we don't see today. I tend to snottily dismiss anything that strikes me as middlebrow, but in a culture of mergers, where the midlist (for both books and music--Captain Beefheart spent his career on a MAJOR LABEL, which is unimaginable to me now) is the first thing to go, I wonder if an unthinking admiration for book-larnin' maybe wasn't better than nothing. Just my two cents.

― Phil Christman, Saturday, 24 January 2004 05:50 (twenty-two years ago)

Today's Book Review (Jan 25th)
Fiction Reviews: The Grandmothers by Doris Lessing. Love & Hydrogen(short stories)&Project X(novel) by Jim Shepard.Swann's Way & In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower by Marcel Proust(new translations).Rape-A Love Story-Joyce Carol Oates. Collected Poems of Paul Auster. A Saint,More Or Less-Henry Grunwald. The Grenadillo Box-Janet Gleeson. Place Keepers-Poems of Brendan Galvin.The Winemaker's Daughter-Timothy Egan.The Red Passport-Katherine Shonk
And a back page essay on Sherlock Holmes being gay. and the crime section that reviews crime fiction.
The rest of the reviews (7 of them) are devoted to non-fiction books.Some of the books i mentioned above were in the Books In Brief section which has shorter reviews. 4 of the fiction reviews were full-page. 6 of the non-fiction reviews were full-page or longer.

― scott seward (scott seward), Sunday, 25 January 2004 23:22 (twenty-two years ago)

this is a trend pretty much across the board,isn't it?
i agree that its sad that literature is being given less room in papers,although i'm not sure whether today's "literary fiction" is worthy of much coverage either...
i was pleasently surprised when the london times on saturday actually expanded their arts supplement and started printing longer,more in depth articles,which would seem to be going completely against the grain...

― robin (robin), Monday, 26 January 2004 09:54 (twenty-two years ago)

Our Books section editor says that it's hard to do long, in-depth reviews of fiction without going into tedious detail about the book's plot.

― LondonLee (LondonLee), Monday, 26 January 2004 14:02 (twenty-two years ago)

The situation's much the same here in Australia. Our two "eminent" weekend broadsheets, 'The Australian' and 'The Age' used to have quite reasonable book coverage in the early nineties, at least eight or nine pages, generally good and interesting content with few ads. Now you'll be lucky to get a full page, and when you get more than one page, you can bet that at least a third of it will be advertisement or "special offers". The stuff they review is generally tepid and the essays, if you can find one, wholly uninspired and boring.

― writingstatic (writingstatic), Monday, 26 January 2004 23:45 (twenty-two years ago)

thats possibly a good point lee,but i don't necessarily see why a book section should be limited to book reviews...
what paper do you write for,by the way?

― robin (robin), Tuesday, 27 January 2004 13:06 (twenty-two years ago)

I'm a designer, not a writer, at the Atlantic Monthly. We tend to run more "essays" than reviews anyway.

Ben Schwarz, our books editor, actually wrote something on this subject recently: Why we review the books we do

― LondonLee (LondonLee), Tuesday, 27 January 2004 13:28 (twenty-two years ago)

I'd prefer middle-class aspirations toward learning to upper-class "I don't need to know anything except that I'm better than you" airheadery. Sorry, had to restrain myself just now from spitting on a lady's fur coat (she and her friends were taking the bus for fun and made me late for work, CUNT CUNT CUNT).

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Tuesday, 27 January 2004 18:09 (twenty-two years ago)

Ann: Amen. Keep the class warfare coming.
I find myself in an odd position sometimes--having intellectual interests that are seen by some as "elitist," yet not being an elite myself, while the person who does run my country appears to, well, not know anything except that he's better than me.

― Phil Christman, Wednesday, 28 January 2004 00:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Isn't it crazymaking?! When I moved to Chicago from Wisconsin I was cowed at first by the fact that in some nabes there are 1/4-million dollar condos lining block after block. But then you meet some of the people who live in them and you just go, jesus, sure, you could buy and sell my entire family ten times over -- but if you jumped from the stack of books my dad reads in a year onto the stack of books you've read in your lifetime you'd break your FUCKING NECK ten times over. And somehow you illiterate vultures are better than I am? HUH?!?!? No, I'm afraid you just aren't.

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Wednesday, 28 January 2004 04:15 (twenty-two years ago)

I love that image of a person in a suit jumping from a high stack of books to a low one and breaking their neck. I'm stealing that one, with your permission.

― Phil Christman, Wednesday, 28 January 2004 18:36 (twenty-two years ago)

Time is money, baby! Maybe if your Dad spent more time hustling and getting the green and less time reading, you'd be sitting pretty right now.

Oh, who am I kidding. What's the point of having money unless it's to BUY MORE BOOKS!

I now have the perfect job. I manage a charity bookshop. People donate books to us for free, I buy them for cheap, I make money for charity. Yay!

This has nothing to do with your thread. Sorry. All I know is that the LRB seems to have a lot more articles about non-fiction than about fiction, which actually suits me fine, because when it comes to fiction I prefer to read the stuff itself rather than read essays or reviews about it, whereas with non-fiction I like to read the essays. It saves me having to read the books themselves.

― accentmonkey (accentmonkey), Wednesday, 28 January 2004 18:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Hey Phil -- go ahead, but be forewarned: I've already used it. Managed to get a [very clever and cooperative] interviewee to agree with it, in fact. I am Satan.

― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Friday, 30 January 2004 23:38 (twenty-two years ago)

Money as status v. Bookshelves as status FITE

― gabbneb (gabbneb), Saturday, 7 February 2004 17:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Bookshelves rule. Period. (But only if they're filled with books and not knick-knacky crap that just collects dust.)

― I'm Passing Open Windows (Ms Laura), Saturday, 7 February 2004 19:53 (twenty-two years ago)

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