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content/blog/2004-01-23-the-book-may-not-be-dead.md

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+---
+title: 'The Book May Not Be Dead...'
+date: '2004-01-23T11:06:05-05:00'
+permalink: /the-book-may-not-be-dead/
+tags:
+    - novels
+---
+
+…but it’s possible that the book review is.
+
+Or at least that the serious book-review publication is. Witness this [demoralizing development](http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=57&aid=59576) at the [New York Times Book Review](http://nytimes.com/pages/books/review/index.html): as if we didn’t all already know that the NYTBR was skewed toward non-fiction, this is in the process of becoming official editorial policy. Moreover, what fiction gets reviewed will now lean explicitly toward the airport-novel, and decidedly away from the literary.
+
+What effect might this shift have on the publishing industry? Will the industry turn away, at least in part, from the NYTBR’s arbitration of success, or will this “marginalization”[^1] of literature in the review-world cause the publishing industry to follow suit?
+
+[^1]: I have to put this in scare quotes in no small part because I’ve spent the last several decades (or so it feels) working on a manuscript that’s precisely about how these metaphors of “marginalization” with regard to the literary are (a) untrue, and (b) politically suspect. I now find myself, in many regards, pondering the ironies of that stance.