BRING BACK STEWING

on the idea that book reviews are boring & repetitive

I had a whole idea of writing about how great the Steve Madden interview is on The Cutting Room Floor, and how authors could learn something about “author brand” from that interview (merge the you-you with performance-you)—in which Steve Madden is so utterly himself (cue Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls for the Madden & literature connection), but then I saw this on notes when I logged into Substack, and I have some (apparently ranging) thoughts.

Okay, this is pure conjecture. At least from the reviews I’ve read on the publicist side of things. Manov literally says here that “many working book reviewers don’t have time” to … read the book they’re reviewing. A travesty. I’ll get back to this.

But we all know my feelings about blurbs, but if you’ve ever been on the inside of the blurb email chain where a press and author are trying to figure out who to ask because the author is not already a literary darling living in NYC, then you would understand that not everyone is scooping their friends and favors for a blurb.

Sometimes, writers are legitimately asking their heroes and hoping that a turnaround of eight-ish weeks (I’m being kind on how many weeks publishers offer) is enough time for that hero to come up with something compassionate enough that more than the hero’s name stands out on back matter. Though, again, let’s be real about blurbs— we are looking for name recognition and not so much substance on a blurb—though a bad blurb or a say-nothing blurb can do more harm than good. Worst all, if a blurb is confusing.

Last week a writer emailed me a blurb and said, “do you think she thought the book was trash?” That … shouldn’t be a question when you get a blurb back, but sometimes they say nothing. Fluff. They can sound pretty and say nothing too, I’ve read a lot of books like that. The same can be said of book reviews, and maybe those are the reviews Manov is talking about there. Personally, I love a specific blurb like a love a specific book review—about a point in the book that gripped them rather than a generality filled with adjectives like “unputdownable.” Some of the best blurbs I’ve seen are on JoAnna Novak’s many books. Read some from her most recent poetry collection here. Her most recent story collection here. An older poetry collection here. Her nonfiction book Contradiction Days arguably has the most boring blurbs of any of her books.

If you don’t feel like clicking a link, some lines: “Reading Novak is like eating a “mousetrap sandwich” on the edge of rapture,” (Sabrina Orah Mark); “If a third-trimester Holly Golightly, famished and sporting an island-tan, had been written by Jean Rhys for a leading role as a haberdasher in Rosemary’s Baby, we might suspect JoAnna Novak of plagiarizing a lost cult classic,” (Andrew Zawacki); “DOMESTIREXIA is an astonishing pleasure dome of lyric cake, all verve and scrumptious compression," (Greg Wrenn); “Novak makes language feel alive and peculiar, defamiliarized and zoo-like. I love the sensation of reading these poems aloud—thickly luxurious and 'I’m naked under this surplice, picking / varnish off my palms,” (Arisa White).

These blurbs live and breathe—bring back the body of the blurb. (LOL why did my lapsed-Catholic (is there such a thing?) brain, “amen” like I was first communioning. It lives deep that cradle guilt.

But I digress. Reviewers read the book. And I know this because I send (usually) 40+ advanced reading copies to reviewers *that request it* (at Pine State we’re not in the market of sending 100+ arcs to a random book room in Manhattan hoping we get discovered) and get back a handful of coverage, the 24 other folks either didn’t connect with the book, lost track of time, or ghosted. Likely, they didn’t read the book.

And if they read enough that they formed an opinion, they’ll do an interview, which is definitely lower stakes than a review (at least on the part of the reader and puts the onus of work back on the writer). You’ll see that publicity coverage has shifted (I believe) to books having more interviews than they do reviews, which is interesting because presses haven’t figured out how to include interviews in metadata (like … the Amazon listing for the book where they shove all the blurbs and praise into bite size quotes with the goal of making it look like a lot of coverage on the Amazon page), so those interviews technically don’t live as long for the author as a review might. They’re fun, and often overwhelming when everyone wants to interview you in a Google doc and no one wants to review, right at the week before publication), but they aren’t serving time.

And let’s be clear—a book review is a byline. If you’re in a college creative writing program right now hoping to publish a book traditionally some day, my best advice to you is to write book reviews, with voice, with the same energy you would write an essay or a poem—hell, include the personal, that’s even better. I love when a reviewer situates the book (Brandon Taylor says in that interview above in The Point that Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake made him feel like had Lyme disease. Make reviews contagious again!).

Side note: An agent looking at your query letter isn’t going to search for you in Esquire, but they’re going to see you've written for Esquire—it doesn’t matter if that’s a reported essay or book criticism, it’s the byline. It’s a marker. You want a way in to the bigger publications, that slide is through book reviews.

How many of you saw that viral AI list of FAKE summer reading books from the Chicago Sun Times which was syndicated to several other newspapers. I will not link to it because it doesn’t need more clicks. Imagine if we shared ACTUAL criticism with that level of ferocity. If we supported our own community by sharing reviews that moved us. If we read reviews at all. It’s why I’ll always say that a negative review isn’t actually negative. That’s going to be shared and shared and shared and shared and sent in the group chats and talked about at publicity meetings. Might it suck for a little bit for the writer? Sure. But it’s bringing attention to the book. And if a review is scathing enough, sometimes I want to read the book myself for proof. (Should we call this the Lauren Oyler effect?) Unfortunately this is a symptom of how well negativity does online and how much more traction it gets. I have no remedy or recourse for that, and I don’t want to feed the machine, but I do think more folks read Molly by Blake Butler than would have if it weren’t for the hubbub, and at the very least more readers have a reference point for who Blake Butler is as a writer. Thank your haters, I guess.

Cleveland Review of Books latest

But to get back to the main point, that folks writing book reviews aren’t reading the book. My flabbers are gasted and I’m sweaty behind the knees. And this quote is coming from someone who only writes reviews of books that are going to be big anyway—that have the financial backing or the celebrity author (I say celebrity lightly) to bring in clicks. So, are they reading reviews at say—Cleveland Review of Books, which is publishing some of the most interesting criticism at the moment. (Also, the website is aesthetically pleasing). One of the arguments I always make on behalf of Pine State is that we are working to get coverage for books that are typically not coming to us with bells and whistles. It’s easy to pitch Melissa Febos. It’s easy to pitch Sally Rooney. It’s easy to pitch the third book by critically acclaimed (insert author here). It’s the debuts that are hard, it’s the people with no name recognition, the people whose platform you are building while you’re convincing folks that their voice matters too. And your major newspaper reviewers (which I’m guessing is what Manov is pointing to here) are often getting assigned or choosing books that are backed by big money (big marketing?), or big name. So, it doesn’t matter so much the substance of the review, just that the headline has the name of a writer who garners clicks. We live in the click age, look around—it sucks here. I guarantee somewhere in a newsroom someone made the comment about how much propulsion the Sun Times got from the AI mistakes, your click IS worth something.

But my job is quite literally to get people to open the damn book. Does this mean that sometimes I’m picking out the spiciest thing I can find? Sure! Does this mean I’m trying to speak nitty gritty connection points between critic and book? Yes! Does this mean I will write 37 pitch iterations for one book? Yes. I don’t want you to open my email and request a copy for it to lay on your floor, I want you to be enamored enough that you open the damn book. So, excuse me, if I’m not reading criticism of Sally Rooney because Manov is right, it does all sound the same (unless it’s an essay!) and I’m going to read the book for myself anyway.

I read a comment in that thread from BDM about critics taking on the marketing spin of the book, and then writing a review to that framing. I roll over in my flu-grave at that thought. Yes, this is written with flu-brain.

(Though I immediately think of how we had a conversation this week about the way questions are framing more and more book coverage. We talked about Rachel Richardson’s SMOTHER as an example, in which her publicity team must have sent the question “How do we raise children in a world that is burning?” because it is the central question of so much of the publicity. It’s a good question, tbh, and I hope she likes it because it introduced the book. (My thoughts are yes, love questions, and also who is this question leaving out that would love the book—though does that matter if they’re sitting in traffic listening to KQED, and so they get the benefit of the whole conversation not just the question. It’s the headline of the High Country News piece too. It’s skirted by in this LARB review, which focuses more on the book as an elegy to a friend).

How boring! GAH. To use the marketing copy as a box, not to break the book out of , but to keep it in. Bring back thought! We live in the time where everyone on social media has a hot take, a point to make, a quip, and you’re telling me that we don’t have the time or energy to take those points down their many rabbit holes. Bring back considering! Stewing! (I stopped myself before typing “meditating!”) Have we forgotten how fun it is to analyze? To untangle. To meddle. A good review is like gossip—it’s like tweedling through the brain folds. It’s why Brandon Taylor is so good at it. I get it, you might step in some shit when you’re writing criticism, but to quote Sam Franzini (a reviewer who reads the books) in Brooklyn Rail (a great place for book criticism, read Loré Yessuff’s review of Sheila Heti!), “…I prefer a bold writer over a scared one.”

I’m not reading reviews to come to some agreement, to come to a compromise, to feel some sort of familiarity, I want to be surprised when I read book criticism. I want it to have bite, not meaning negativity, but conversation. It’s true, book reviews can say nothing, much like blurbs. They can talk about formalities, or craft, or sentences, or sometimes even disagreements over how the book is written or structured (which tells me the reviewer wanted a different book than the one they’re reviewing, that’s not…criticism, that’s imagination), but good book reviews create conversation, with the reader of them and the book they’re discussing. They give me new reasons to pick up a book beyond the marketing copy. They point out something I hadn’t thought while reading.

I’ll die on the hill, book reviews should feel closer to fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, than they do anything else (namely op-eds or college essays). Of course they should have a point, but they should also have what all good writing has—voice, conviction, language play, surprise, craft, layers, depth of meaning, intrigue. It’s true, we don’t often get that from the big dawgs, and I wonder if that has something to do with the move towards newsrooms assigning writers-of-the-same-circles to write reviews. You’ll notice, for instance, that Margaret Renkl gets the eco-animal books at NYT. And that WSJ often finds reviewers that are writing in the same camp as the writer (not just genre, but topically). As if, familiarity should be the point of the review. You write about animals, Steve, so you should review this new book about Cats. No, run! I wish they took more pitches from regular schmegulars.

Before I go, this comment made me laugh so hard. Because I sent an email three days ago about a Kirkus review for one of our books and I said, “it’s so nice when they’re nice,” and my author followed-up with, but did they mean to say “fiction” in that last line when they’re reviewing a hybrid-biography? So, amen, “spiritual and aesthetically wrong too.”

I probably didn’t stew enough before I wrote this rash newsletter, but here we are. Sometimes I can’t help myself.

---

As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here, and you can buy our books here! You can also see what we’re working on and contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Dr. Melody Glenn wrote a powerful op-ed about fentanyl and the border for Salon and her book Mother of Methadone got a beautiful early review in New Pages, Nicole Graev Lipson is on the JWA Summer Bookshelf and a review of Mothers and Other Fictional Characters is in the newest issue of BUST, Jehanne Dubrow’s CIVILIANS was reviewed in Collateral, and Lisa Russ Spaar’s Paradise Close in Tupelo Quarterly, Daisy Atterbury was interviewed in Write or Die Tribe and their book The Kármán Line was reviewed in Foglifter, Rosa Castellano wrote about decentering whiteness in literary space for Literary Hub, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.