Reviews Can Be Saved
A quick rejoinder to the NY Times.
Very recently, the New York Times book critic Dwight Garner wondered where, exactly, book review coverage had gone. “Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics,” Garner wrote. “The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections.”
“Time, Newsweek and other weeklies had serious critics who mattered to the conversation and knocked their heads together like bighorn rams. So much of this is gone. The strangulation sounds of early dial-up should have served as warning.”
Indeed, this is something we’ve long lamented at The Metropolitan Review. The collapse of this critical ecosystem is very real. This is why, of course, TMR exists in the first place.
As exciting as it was to read a critic of Garner’s stature diagnose the crisis, it was frustrating too — he doesn’t propose any solutions. The Times could review more books, especially those by authors with independent presses. Garner could highlight, too, the many smaller publications and individual Substacks trying to pick up the slack.
At The Metropolitan Review, we try to be the change we want to see in the world. We bring the best book and cultural criticism to you every single week. We plan to keep doing this as long as humanely possible.
We’ll review New York Times best-sellers and self-published books alike. We’ll publish the sort of freewheeling and monumental cultural explorations you truly won’t find anywhere else.
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We’ll be back soon with the usual programming.
—The Editors
The problem is that my experience with you has shown that your editors are not very responsive to writers. If you do not communicate better with the "content providers," you will not survive.