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As was announced yesterday, Kirkus Reviews (and Editor & Publisher) is shutting down. Which kind of has people a bit worked up. It’s not every day that you see such a palpable sign of your industry’s troubles as when one of the few pure trade publications just ceases to be.
When I was at Dalkey, a Kirkus review was a time to bitch and moan about how reviewers never understood our books, and how irritating the phrase “not for everyone” really can be. Some of the meanest reviews I’ve read in my life came from Kirkus. Their anonymous reviewers could pile on a book like no one else. (Although miraculously, for whatever reason, they absolutely love Open Letter titles, giving us our first starred review, taking a look at all of our titles from the get go, etc.)
Along with Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, Kirkus has served as one of the most influential advance reviews around. Jerome Kramer does a great job summing this up and looking at some of the implications in his editorial for Publishing Perspectives:
I know the significant value Kirkus has in its brand equity, the decades of accumulated goodwill, or at least begrudging respect, for its often-accurate, frequently-prescient and sometimes perversely mean-spirited reviews. For decades, those reviews have been a critical piece of the tinder that publicists use to light a fire under a book—the real flame coming from the coverage in People or The New York Times or Oprah. The industry religion has held that those places, where coverage can actually move a lot of copies, look to the advance sources for guidance. [. . .]
So it may well be that the magazine’s end is entirely an unfortunate outcome of media company bean-counting. The intriguing question, though, is whether the industry still needs advance reviews the way it used to. Like it or not, they’re worth less every day in a world where everyone’s sister’s friend has a handle or a blog like Readermommy or Bookluvah (I tried to make up names that don’t exist, really I did, but it’s near impossible—sorry Readermommy and Bookluvah). The dynamics that used to drive book promotion and marketing have been radically altered over the past five to ten years, with the explosion of online equivalents to hand-selling and friend recommendations so incredibly prevalent all over the web. The decimation of conventional review outlets has been well documented and thoroughly lamented. But it may well be that the takeover of the real-estate formerly occupied by thoroughly-informed, well-read, smarty-pants professional reviewers by user-generated content and literary bloggers is inexorable.
The reality is that today’s generation of book marketers and publicists will figure out how to move ahead, with or without advance reviews, and the staffers at People and The New York Times and Oprah will have no shortage of sources coaxing them to this or that title. And yet, there remains the distinct sense that something will be missing, that some gap will be opened up. And what that means, of course, is an opportunity for someone to fill it. Good luck, someone.
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
This slender, uncanny volume—the second, best-selling collection of stories by Russian author Ludmilla Petrushevskaya to appear in the U.S.—has already received considerable, well-deserved praise from many critics and high profile publications. Its seventeen short tales, averaging ten pages each, are. . .
Reviewed by Rachael Daum
The Urdu word basti refers to any space, intimate to worldly, and is often translated as “common place” or “a gathering place.” This book by Intizar Husain, who is widely regarded as one of the most important living Pakistani writers,. . .
Reviewed by Vincent Francone
The Whispering Muse, one of three books by Icelandic writer Sjón just published in North America, is nothing if not inventive. Stories within stories, shifting narration, leaps in time, and characters who transform from men to birds and back again—you’ve. . .
Reviewed by Camila Santos
Luis Negrón’s debut collection Mundo Cruel is a journey through Puerto Rico’s gay world. Published in 2010, the book is already in its fifth Spanish edition. Here in the U.S., the collection has been published by Seven Stories Press and. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
“South”
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bank of shadow to have watched
the scattered lights
my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their places in constellations
to have heard the ring of. . .
Reviewed by Larissa Kyzer
When Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason first published LoveStar, his darkly comic parable of corporate power and media influence run amok, the world was in a very different place. (This was back before both Facebook and Twitter, if you can. . .
Reviewed by Tiffany Nichols
When starting Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, Santiago Roncagliolo’s second work to be translated into English, I was expecting Roncagliolo to explore the line between evil and religion that was front and center in Red April. Admittedly, I. . .
Reviewed by Josh Billings
Christa Wolf’s newly-translated City of Angels is a novel of atonement, and in this way the work of art that it resembles most to me is not another book, but the 2003 Sophia Coppola film Lost in Translation. Like that. . .
Reviewed by Grant Barber
French author—philosopher, poet, novelist—de Roblès writes something approaching the Great (Latin) American Novel, about Brazilian characters, one of whom is steeped in the life of the seventeenth century polymath (but almost always erroneous) Jesuit Athanasius Kircher. Eleazard von Wogau, a. . .
Reviewed by Brendan Riley
A rich, beautifully written, consistently surprising satire, Yan Lianke’s Lenin’s Kisses boasts an elaborate, engrossing plot with disarming twists and compelling characters both challenged and challenging. It leads the reader on a strange pilgrimage—often melancholy but certainly rewarding—through a China. . .
Three Percent is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts.
