Are book reviewers out of print?

Motoko Rich very kindly mentions this site — and a number of other blogs, including TEV, Bookslut, and Syntax of Things — in her New York Times article on the unfortunate disappearance of newspaper book reviews like the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s.

Maud Newton, who has been writing a literary blog since 2002, said she has the freedom to follow obsessions like, say, Mark Twain in a way that a newspaper book review could not, unless there was a current book on the subject. But she would never consider what she does a replacement for more traditional book reviews.

“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think that people are doing very, very different things.”

For some perspective on these remarks, I refer you to the closest thing to a mission statement this site has ever had: A dictatorship, not a democracy (posted in December, 2003).

Also, I participated last year in “Critical Edge,” a blog-versus-print discussion at Arts Journal. There Rolling Stone‘s Anthony DeCurtis leapt in with the sneering enjoinder to blog on, little honeybees, blog on — we have, thanks! — and cast writers’ willingness “to work for nothing or next to it” as a quasi-unethical act.

My response: Thoughts from a “little honeybee.” And before that: Venue, or voice?
 

Image credit: Berenice Abbott’s News Stand, 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, Manhattan, November 1935 was taken from the NYPL’s Changing New York collection.


Categories

Newsletter Signup

Subscribe to my free newsletter, Ancestor Trouble.

Newsletter

You might want to subscribe to my free Substack newsletter, Ancestor Trouble, if the name makes intuitive sense to you.