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September 04, 2007

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT

The current cover story of the Columbia Journalism Review is Steve Wasserman's bravura look at the state of newspaper book reviewing in this country.   He says much in his 10,000 words with which we agree, including this:

A harsher truth may lurk behind the headlines as well: book coverage is not only meager but shockingly mediocre. The pabulum that passes for most reviews is an insult to the intelligence of most readers. One is tempted to say, perversely, that its disappearance from the pages of America’s newspapers is arguably cause for celebration.

The entire essay is required reading for anyone who cares about contemporary letters, and is sure to fire up all sides in the "Crisis in Book Reviewing" discussion.  As it happens, you'll have a chance to question Wasserman directly when he appears on a panel at Columbia University convened to continue this discussion.  Here's the panel information:

The panel will take place at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, September 18 in the third-floor Lecture Hall of the Journalism Building, 116th and Broadway.  The panelists will be:

· Steve Wasserman worked for fourteen years at the Los Angeles Times, five in the opinion department and nine as editor of the respected Los Angeles Times Book Review. The former editorial director of Times Books and a former publisher and editorial director of Hill & Wang, Wasserman is managing director of the New York office of the literary agency Kneerim & Williams at Fish & Richardson, and is book editor of www.truthdig.com.

· Peter Osnos is the founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs, an independent publisher specializing in journalism, history, biography, and social criticism. A former correspondent, foreign editor, and national editor of The Washington Post, he is Vice Chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review and writes a regular media column distributed by the Century Foundation.

· Elisabeth Sifton, a former editor at Viking and Knopf, is senior vice president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the author of The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War.

· Carlin Romano, the longtime and respected books editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, is now the literary critic for the paper. He is also critic-at-large of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and a former president of the National Book Critics Circle. He teaches media theory and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

· Mark Sarvas is host of the literary blog The Elegant Variation, and a widely published book reviewer and critic. His debut novel, Harry, Revised, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2008.

The moderator for the panel will be CJR’s publisher, Evan Cornog, who is the journalism school’s associate dean for academic affairs, and author of The Power and the Story, How the crafted presidential narrative has determined success, from George Washington to George W. Bush.

Yes, we'll be part of the panel, and we're quoted in Wasserman's essay.  But don't read it for us.  Read it for the most interesting look yet published on life inside the editorial hothouse.  It's easy for blogchair critics to Sunday quaterback newspaper decisions (God knows, we wrote the book) but there's always more going on than one can realize, and Wasserman takes us all inside.  His prognosis is an uneasy one but he's not one to give up hope.  Nor are we.

Posted at 12:30 AM in Events, Litlinks |

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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