Is it really the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books”?

May 3, 2022 6:24 AM

Measuring the extent of self-reviewing at the New York Review of Books from 1963-2022
posted by Etrigan (24 comments total)

In so far as the NYRB invites any people who write books to review books this seems kinda inevitable? There are only so many mid-list authors with intellectual pretensions that can be tapped for this sort of thing.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:38 AM on May 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

I’d like to see a similar analysis using blurbs and the NYTimes over the years.
posted by sciencegeek at 6:59 AM on May 3, 2022

Wikipedia says:

Early issues included articles by such writers as Hardwick, Lowell, Jason Epstein, Hannah Arendt, W. H. Auden, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, Truman Capote, Paul Goodman,[23] Lillian Hellman, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Anthony Lewis, Dwight Macdonald, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, Philip Rahv, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Gore Vidal, Robert Penn Warren and Edmund Wilson. The Review pointedly published interviews with European political dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Václav Havel...

Over the years, the Review has featured reviews and articles by such international writers and intellectuals, in addition to those already noted, as Timothy Garton Ash, Margaret Atwood, Russell Baker, Saul Bellow, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Bloom, Joseph Brodsky, Ian Buruma, Noam Chomsky, J. M. Coetzee, Frederick Crews, Ronald Dworkin, John Kenneth Galbraith, Masha Gessen, Nadine Gordimer, Stephen Jay Gould, Christopher Hitchens, Tim Judah, Murray Kempton, Paul Krugman, Richard Lewontin, Perry Link, Alison Lurie, Peter Medawar, Daniel Mendelsohn, Bill Moyers, Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Nader, V. S. Naipaul, Peter G. Peterson, Samantha Power, Nathaniel Rich, Felix Rohatyn, Jean-Paul Sartre, John Searle, Zadie Smith, Timothy Snyder, George Soros, I. F. Stone, Desmond Tutu, John Updike, Derek Walcott, Steven Weinberg, Garry Wills and Tony Judt.

posted by gwint at 7:09 AM on May 3, 2022

I am not a reader of the NYRB, but I have noticed a similar thing in the New Yorker, where an author with a book coming out first gets highlighted in one of the short pieces up front, then has an excerpt published as a short fiction piece, then gets a big profile piece, then gets their book reviewed. It can end up feeling very samey, with a lot of attention going to a small number of the same people, and it doesn't surprise me that a component is the exchange of reviews.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:21 AM on May 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

In so far as the NYRB invites any people who write books to review books this seems kinda inevitable? There are only so many mid-list authors with intellectual pretensions that can be tapped for this sort of thing.

I'm a long time subscriber, and it is of course true that the NYRB gets really good writers to write for them, and then also of course reviews the really good writers when they have a book. And with their rotating circle they have a big list of contributors which means more overlap. And if someone rights a major book they like, well, then they get asked to review future stuff. But I'm still surprised, especially by the one year numbers being so high. They don't have that many contributors, that they're covering 10% or more of the notable books each year!

It's definitely a circle. There are writers with paper resumes that seem like they'd be good candidates they don't tap--Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Niall Ferguson, etc. Not inviting them to the club seems good to me, but it's a decision. Worse is that this leads to a very white contributor list; I think the current editor (Emily Greenhouse, who took over after the Ian Buruma scandal) is well aware of this and working to diversify.

Anyway, I think it's a great periodical. I find books to read, and the reviews are so substantive that I also learn a lot about topics from reviews of books that I'll never read. (For that meaning of "a lot" that is also "not much"--it was an NYRB reader who tried to explain Rebecca Solnit's own book to her.) If it weren't paywalled I think there'd be more links to it on the blue.
posted by mark k at 7:51 AM on May 3, 2022 [4 favorites]

This is relevant to like 10 of my interests!
posted by Think_Long at 8:25 AM on May 3, 2022

Yes, the NYRB is an elite club, which has its pros (quality control) and cons (way to many old pale males). Another point to add to mark k's points, is that to get to the point of writing a book that might appear in the NYRB, most authors have to spend years (decades?) giving deference to those more senior than them. Of course, brutally honest/critical reviews by junior folks do happen, and they can make people's careers - but they're risky. Established names can afford to say what they really think without much risk to their careers, hence, their reviews tend to be more valuable.
posted by coffeecat at 8:41 AM on May 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is a fun project, thanks for posting!

I'm not too familiar with the NY Review of Books. But I was listening to an interview with Eugene Lim last night and was just thinking about how many incredible and experimental and young and women and non-white and non-US/UK writers are doing such interesting work right now who I don't think seem to be in these literary circle jerks. Some authors I've found so interesting in the last few years, a few I've read recently for examples: Yuri Herrera, Anna Moschovakis, Deesha Philyaw, who do seem to have gotten notice and reviews, but not elevated in these specific literary circles? Or all the supposed 'genre' artists doing interesting projects in comics, illustrated fiction, speculative work.. So many poets doing weird and new stuff too. It seems silly to have a literary review that doesn't gravitated toward what's new and interesting. I'm basing this more on the linked FPP than on any direct knowledge of the New York Review of Books. They are a great publisher though!

Somewhat related: What's your favorite Review of Books? Googling some of the above writers I notice the LA Review of Books seems to show a lot of interest in younger and weirder authors.
posted by latkes at 9:10 AM on May 3, 2022

Yes, but how many of the personal ads are really just NYRB contributors??
posted by Corduroy at 10:31 AM on May 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

Bringing this up reminds me of the old Spy Magazine feature "Logrolling In Our Time" which would display paired instances of writers positively blurbing each other's books, often effusively, and often ridiculously so.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 10:38 AM on May 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

I subscribed for a while, but decided they rarely discussed books I found interesting, but I never noticed that there was a subject/object reversal going on. I read the article when it came out, and thought “hmm, this is completely uninteresting.” It seemed like the author spent a lot of time trying to find something that could be plotted that would look interesting or damning or something. My suggestion would be to apply the same methods to some similar magazines, but I don’t know that there are any. The NYRoB seems like a bit of a literary coelacanth.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 10:58 AM on May 3, 2022

the old Spy Magazine feature

Archive.org has the run of Spy online for the curious.
posted by BWA at 11:56 AM on May 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Richard Kostelanetz's book The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (1973) goes into great detail about the ingroupishness of the New York Review of Books, the main NY publishing companies, and a relatively narrow group of authors at that earlier period. The link leads to a recent reassessment of the book, fifty years later.
posted by Bureau of Public Secrets at 12:34 PM on May 3, 2022

I don’t find these graphs very satisfying - just from a design perspective I feel like they could have done a lot more. Although it’s a big dataset to analyse for a weekend project, so kudos to the author for working out how to scrape and display it. I think bar charts would have been better than line graphs, and also I note that one of the axis tops out at 30, giving a false impression that 100% of the books reviews in that period have some in-house connection.

The NYRB seems to be the stuffy end of the market, and the LA review and London review of books have better cred with a more left wing set of subjects and approaches. However, given the subject matter - serious thinking about serious books - there is a limited set of authors who are available, can work on the reviews, and would take time off from their own work. I’m fine with this, because reading the reviews in the LRB or the LARB is the closest I’ll get to reading a lot of these books.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:40 PM on May 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

I note that one of the axis tops out at 30, giving a false impression that 100% of the books reviews in that period have some in-house connection

I noticed the same thing, and lowered the needle on my Outrage-O-Meter from "OMG" to "meh."
posted by kirkaracha at 3:50 PM on May 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Corduroy, in 2018 I used some of the NYRB personal ads (from old issues that were from around 2009, so pre-Tindr, etc.) in college first-year seminar class to get students to think about we can learn from popular source material. For fun, I asked them how old they though the ads were - most guessed from around the 1950s/60s. They were floored when I told the truth.
posted by coffeecat at 4:20 PM on May 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

My mother met her partner courtesy of the personal ads of the NYRB.
posted by hoyland at 6:24 PM on May 3, 2022 [3 favorites]

My grandfather met his second wife via the NYRB as well - I've never seen the ad he placed, but my dad distinctly remembers that he described himself as "gumpy eyed."
posted by coffeecat at 7:17 PM on May 3, 2022 [2 favorites]

All these different ways of slicing up the data, and none of them really satisfy. What I want to know is how many closed reviewer-reviewee loops there are. I mean, I assume their are no actual pairs of authors reviewing each other's books (A reviews B; B reviews A), which is the tantalizing promise of the headline. But are there any A reviews B, B reviews C, C reviews A loops? The real scandal here is that the article starts with a word cloud, and never follows that up by adding reviewer-->reviewee arrows. That's the real scandal.
posted by nobody at 11:13 PM on May 3, 2022

To wrap up this section, you might find it interesting to know that there have been 176 reviews in which a reviewer has reviewed a writer who reviewed them (1.3% of all reviews).

It’s all in a pandas data frame somewhere, it does seem like a directed graph would be easy.
posted by clew at 11:40 PM on May 3, 2022

Thinking about some of comments/complaints, I suspect one issue is that the NYRB sounds like it has universal aspirations. If you analyzed the circle of writers who appeared in Weird Tales I'm sure you'd find similar clubiness and omissions.

The NYRB is, in its own way, just as niche. If you read every book that they reviewed or commented on it'd be impressive but I'm not sure you'd be "well read:" you'd have huge blind spots. I basically ignore the fiction reviews, especially the contemporary ones; just not my cup of tea. I think something like the New York Times Book Review probably has clearer aspirations to be broad in its coverage, at least within the scope of its readers' demographics.

I mean, I assume their are no actual pairs of authors reviewing each other's books (A reviews B; B reviews A), which is the tantalizing promise of the headline

I'd be shocked if there weren't! It's been around 60 years, and writers have opinions on other writers' work. There's going to be lots of pairs like that globally; I don't see it as a major conflict just because it appears in the same publication.
posted by mark k at 11:54 PM on May 3, 2022

It seems silly to have a literary review that doesn't gravitated toward what's new and interesting. I'm basing this more on the linked FPP than on any direct knowledge of the New York Review of Books.

The thing about the NYRB is that it's different things to different people. I'm sure there are people who are reading it with the expectation of reading about new/interesting literary work. And, yeah, I'm honestly not sure it does that particularly well. Or my tastes are very much not what they're targeting. When I last read it regularly (which was in high school), I was reading it for what are essentially just long current events essays, I largely skipped the literary stuff. I remember a Tony Judt piece that purported to be reviewing maybe five academic books about medieval France and was actually N thousand words on why the Iraq war was a terrible idea. That was an extreme example (and I think Tony Judt had a particular flair for it), but there's a lot of "this is actually just an essay about the same topic as the book I said I was reviewing".
posted by hoyland at 5:53 AM on May 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

I'm a long-time subscriber to the London Review of Books (currently running about six issues behind in my reading). It used to have great personal ads, back when they offered a prize of a bottle of whisky for the best one. Now that the prize has gone, I no longer turn to the back pages first.
posted by altolinguistic at 6:35 AM on May 4, 2022 [1 favorite]

When I was a subscriber, I used it as a sort of edited wikipedia, especially as it related to non-fiction. The review usually gave a succinct background of whatever the book was about, or the background of the author's other works, before getting to the book itself. I learned so much from that. I rarely read fiction reviews, as I don't read fiction anymore. But it got to be overwhelming after a while, with the backlog of reading I had to do. I unsubscribed to save my own ego. I hope to get back to subscribing soon.

One of the best things I remember reading is the evisceration of Niall Ferguson by Pankaj Gupta, especially his non-economics related hot-air. Also the take down of Judith Miller. That surprised me even more as she was married to Jason Epstein at that time.
posted by indianbadger1 at 10:45 AM on May 5, 2022 [2 favorites]