Ramola D on The Age of Independent Reviewing

From Tillie Olsen’s Silences (1978), in which she follows on Malcolm Cowley’s 1954 findings in The Literary Situation:

“Few books ever have the attention of a review—good or bad. Fewer stay longer than a few weeks on bookstore shelves—if they get there at all. New books are always coming in. Quality or ephemera—if the three- or four-week-old one hasn’t yet made best-sellerdom or the book clubs (usually synonymous)—Out! Room must be made. It is always fall in the commercial literary world, and books are its seasonal leaves. Even fewer books (again, regardless of merit) are kept alive by critics or academics who could be doing so. “Works of art” (or at least books, stories, poems, meriting life) “disappear before our very eyes because of the lack of responsible attention,” Chekhov wrote nearly ninety years ago. Are they even seen? Out of the moveable feast, critics and academics tend to invoke the same dozen or so writers as if none else exist worthy of mention, or as if they’ve never troubled to read anyone else. Anthologies, textbooks, courses concerned with contemporary literature tend to be made up of living writers whose names will immediately be recognized (usually coincident with writers whom publishers have promoted). …(It) is harder and harder for the serious writer to get published or get to readers once published.”

That was 33 years ago, but things haven’t changed, have they? If anything, they’ve gotten worse. We live in an age of commercial publishing. Not every book that is published is reviewed by the well-known reviewers—the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, any of the big newspapers, the big literary reviews—or by anyone at all. Books released by small presses are notoriously under-reviewed. Advance review copies of thousands of books from small presses sent to mainstream reviewers fall into a giant black hole and are never heard of again. Books by little-known yet exceptional writers are forgotten this way. Books by women and men of every color. And not worthless books—but fantastic books, fabulous, inspiring works of fiction and poetry and memoir, books by writers so surprising, so engaging, so imaginative, that, if you only knew about them, you would want to follow all through their writing careers and read over and over again. The old hierarchies and patriarchies persist. Going by the old criteria, if you’re not part of the inner, elitist, literary coterie, you might not have a writing career.

Yet we live in a day and age, as Tillie Olsen reminds us, true then in the ‘70s, and truer for us today, of burgeoning writing programs, growing independent and small presses, and flourishing literary arts. More of us are writing, by which I mean seriously, and more of us are publishing. More of us, however, are not being noticed, recognized, or reviewed. Publishing a book today, fiction or poetry, doesn’t anymore mean gaining the attention of reviewers, and thence, a larger reading audience.

True, these days there’s Amazon, and Goodreads, and LibraryThing, and all those others, not to mention social networking media and creating a buzz on Facebook or Twitter or Buzz or StumbleUpon, but I’m not talking so much of publicity and promotion, online and otherwise—which we’re constantly told authors should engage in themselves—but of good old-fashioned reviewing, the kind of solid review where a writer/critic with acuity, intelligence, and wit takes the time to read a book, and critique it with verve. Reviews still seem to matter. Why? Because the literary world is interconnected; none of us operates alone. If your book is well-reviewed, the greater your chance to go from hardback to paperback, to be picked up by a trade publisher or a foreign publisher, to be translated into other languages, or to be marketed elsewhere. Or to gain that teaching position you’ve been spending your years of writing struggling to reach.

I’d like to suggest it’s time we as writers created an alternate reviewing sphere which matters. In a recent post on his blog, Book Review editor Joe Ponepinto relates a recent experience of being inundated with responses on a call for reviewers for The Los Angeles Review. This would suggest there are loads of talented writers and critics out there keen to write literary reviews. There are many of us who have so much to give, and no sure venues to send our work to.

But wait, we do have options. Surely we live in the Age of Options! Why not start a book review blog oneself—a la Mark Sarvas, or Maud Newton, or myself! Why not write to or meet the editors of a dozen small presses or literary magazines one admires, offering your reviewing services? Book Review editors at many quarterlies and journals are indeed looking for serious book reviewers. At the AWP conference this past February in Washington, DC (where I live), I stopped by several tables at the Book Fair to mention my interest in reviewing small press fiction and poetry, particularly by bicultural writers, to review editors, and several editors expressed an interest. True, I still have to follow up on some of those conversations (procrastinating me!), but my impression was that reviewers are in demand, and will not be turned away.

My own book of short fiction, Temporary Lives, released late in 2009 by the University of Massachusetts Press, after it received the 2008 AWP Grace Paley Short Fiction Award, was a finalist in the 2010 Library of Virginia Fiction awards, but, after a Publisher’s Weekly review, was not reviewed by any of the big newspapers or magazines. It joins the legions of fine books released by small presses each year which, regrettably, do not obtain the notice of the established reviewing world. Which in itself creates a Silence of the kind Tillie Olsen speaks. Much to our communal loss.

Just as there is a flourishing small press, I believe there should be a flourishing small press reviewing sphere. I call on every writer who cares about books to make an effort to review other writers’ books, especially small press and university press books, whether or not your own book was ignored or recognized by the mainstream reviewing world. Truly, we need to get past the Silences of commercial publishing, alter the status quo. To cite Malcolm Cowley, which Tillie Olsen does, as she closes her essay, “We are the injured body. Let us not desert one another.”

Ramola D is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Review. She currently lives in Arlington, Virginia with her husband and daughter, and teaches creative writing part-time at The George Washington University and at The Writer’s Center, Bethesda. The covers of her books, Temporary Lives and Invisible Season feature her paintings.