Q: How did you end up working at the New York Times Book Review?
A: The short answer is that I'm indebted to the Book Review's previous editor, Chip McGrath, who hired me in 1999. At the time, I was the books editor at Salon. The longer answer is … longer. Growing up, I found myself plowing through great books but also through the works of great critics, and I read everything I could by writers like Pauline Kael, Paul Fussell, Seymour Krim, James Agee, George Orwell, James Wolcott, John Updike, H.L. Mencken and Alfred Kazin, among a bunch of others. The freedom and spiky confidence of their prose, and their abilities to make fine distinctions, just tore my head off. I've done all kinds of writing, but in college I began selling book reviews to the Village Voice, to the old Voice Literary Supplement (VLS), and never really looked back.
Q: What's your average week like in the Book Review?
A: Each issue goes to press on Wednesday afternoon, ten days before you see it in the Sunday paper. So my week, like everyone else's at the Book Review, builds up to and then recedes from Wednesday. On a typical day, after 45 minutes of quasi-productive fiddling around (buying coffee in the eleventh floor company cafeteria, returning e-mail messages, scanning a few web sites), I get to work on the reviews I'm editing. Some of these are painless. Walter Kirn, for example - he's one of our regular critics - files copy that is all but letter-perfect. He's so crazily, unfairly talented he could probably call me from his truck and, in between drags on cigarettes, dictate a review that's smart, rude, elegant and funny at the same time and that would be just about the best thing in the newspaper the day it appeared. But they aren't all that easy. I also sit in on a lot of meetings, to determine which books we should review and who should review them. There are also meetings about things like picking headlines and letters-to-the-editor and art. The best part of the day might be my longish train ride to and from work. That's when I crack open a handful of advance copies of new books and read around in them, looking for a live one - a new writer or book worth telling people about. You want that buzz in your brain; good writing is a kind of drug.
Q: How are books chosen for review, and as the Senior Editor and one of the fiction editors, what's your advice for a fiction author to get his book reviewed in the Book Review?
A: We get a ton of books - a few hundred a week, they never stop - and we look at all of them. The first thing we do is log each one into a database. Then once a week or so, the Book Review's top three editors (Sam Tanenhaus, Bob Harris and myself) sort through them and make piles for each of the "preview editors" on the staff. One editor may specialize in history and politics, and he or she will get a lot of those kinds of books. Someone else might do fiction and poetry, someone else science and philosophy, someone else pop culture and sports. We give them each a tall pile of books, and they read them - or at least enough of them to reach a judgment - and then report back to us. We decide on reviewers as a group. What's the way to get your novel reviewed? Write a good one. Really.
Q: You write the wonderful "Inside the List" column, covering a wide array of topics including politics, gossip, and best-sellers. Where do you get the ideas from?
A: The ideas, I guess, come from the list itself and from things I've read in magazines or online. It can be hard to find something new to say about someone like Danielle Steele, who seems to have a new book every month, so I like to play around the margins of the list whenever I can.
Q: Do you read any "Lit-blogs?" Do you find any of their criticisms on the Book Review constructive?
A: Yeah, I click through a handful of them once or twice a week. I find them particularly useful as news filters - they do a great job of finding stories, providing links to them and telling you, "Hey, this is out there." And a few of the Lit-bloggers have found genuine voices. Some of the criticism of the Book Review is thoughtful and interesting, and when it is, sure, you take it in. Yet a lot of the stuff that's out there is almost comically vicious; it's sort of a race to the bottom, to see who can belch out the ugliest possible thing in the grossest possible way. That kind of gravel, to seriously mix my metaphors, bounces off the windshield.
Q: What's the last good book you read?
A: I like the new Jim Harrison novel, Returning to Earth; I like Walter Kirn's new one, too (The Unbinding), and I'm not just saying that because he's paying me to. For a book I'm writing - a biography of James Agee - I caught up recently with James Atlas's 1977 biography of the American poet Delmore Schwartz. It's a beautiful and moving piece of storytelling, not overburdened with pointless micro-factoids, that reads like a first-class novel.
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