Content area
Full text
What do the best book reviews do? What is the current state of the critical ecosystem? Chicago Review of Books founder Adam Morgan takes stock of book reviewing in the US.
My favorite scene in Greta Gerwig's adMais of Little Women is when the professor, Friedrich Bhaer, reads a few short stories by the budding novelist, Jo March.
"Honestly, I don't like them," Friedrich says. "I think that they're not good."
Jo is stunned. "And who made you high priest of what's good and what's bad?" she replies, before going for Friedrich's throat. "You will always be a critic, and never an author-and the world will forget that you ever even lived."
Literary people always laugh at this line because it feels true. In the public imagination, authors are gods. They forge new universes where before there was only darkness. Critics, on the other hand, are embittered antagonists, like Lucifer cursing the sky in Paradise Lost: "О sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams."
In reality, this dichotomy between authors and critics is false. A great book review can be just as rich, entertaining, and insightful as a great short story. Criticism is literature-a mercurial species of creative nonfiction that fills the shape of its container. Trade publications like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist publish "capsule" reviews of just 200-300 words, usually a few months before a book's pub date. Newspapers like the ton and magazines like Slate publish 800- to 1,200-word reviews when a book hits bookstores. Specialist magazines like Bookforum, World Literature Today, and the New York Review of Books, as well as scholarly journals like Critical Inquiry, publish reviews and "critical essays" as long as they want, whenever they want.
Yet over the last twenty years, many general-interest publications have stopped printing book reviews altogether, leaving critics with fewer opportunities to hone their craft while getting paid. New digital outlets are filling in the gaps-and in many cases reviewing a wider variety of books-but most are underfunded compared to their legacy-media ancestors.
But what makes a good review good? Who's writing them these days? And why have so many publications stopped printing them? I spoke with more than two dozen freelance and full-time book critics to find out.
In...