Michael Orbach at the Knight News had interviewed the folks behind the New York Times Book Review. Orbach’s intro says:

“The New York Times Book Review is considered by many to be the gold standard in book reviews (to quote a nameless author we interviewed: ‘You only know you made it when you’re inside there’). And reaching over 1.7 million people every week, The New York Times Book Review is not only the most high-profile, but also the most read book review publication in the country.”

Here’s Sam Tanenhaus:

We’re also not only in the business of reviewing books, but presenting what we hope will be interesting journalism to readers. It is easier to get a good piece of analysis and writing, a better essay, a better report, whatever you think a book review of being, on non-fiction than fiction. Novels and short stories are very hard to write about. There are few really strong fiction reviewers around and their standards are very high. Because what happens is, even though many of the reviews we run are mixed, and very few are raves, probably more pans than raves, almost every book we send out, we think is pretty good. We send a novel or a short story [collection] out to a critic because we think it’s good and yet the review will often be harsh.

Why is that? Because the critics read them even more critically than we do. If you give a book to a great critic like James Wood or Tony Scott, they see into the machinery of a book, they see all the other novels that it sounds a little bit like, all the influences. What happens is if you send out a lot of mediocre fiction, what you’re going to end up doing is publishing a lot of harshly negative reviews of authors no one’s ever heard of, and it doesn’t seem fair to have a first-time novelist who will get slammed in the pages of the Book Review. We don’t really see the purpose of that.

And Rachel Donadio:

Just as the same films play in multiplexes worldwide, people around the globe are reading the same few books. But on the literary scene, globalization seems to work in one direction: American culture spreads everywhere, but in America we read few books published in Africa or other faraway places. When I was in college in the 90s I was always skeptical about “Post-Colonial studies,” finding the whole thing too faddish. Today, I think some of the most exciting and morally complex writing is coming out of Africa and other post-colonial societies.

Q: Do you read any lit blogs? Do you find their praise or criticisms constructive?

A: If I have time - and the main problem with blogs is that they take way too much valuable reading and writing time - I often browse lit blogs to see what people are getting exercised about. I think they’re good for literary culture, which thrives on debate, no matter how petty. I turn to blogs like galleycat.com or maudnewton.com to guide me to interesting stories in the world press that I might otherwise have missed. I find some blogs lame and sub-literate, fueled more by spite than insight. Not long ago, one blogger called me an “establishment hack,” which I’d like to have printed on my next business cards! Having spent many years working for boutique papers aimed at outsmarting The New York Times, it’s bizarre for me to find myself a kind of institutional figure. But I suppose it would be na’ve of me to deny I’m not. I have become blogger fodder. So be it. Bring it on.

And Dwight Gardner:

What’s the way to get your novel reviewed? Write a good one. Really.

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.

(Thanks, Elegant Variation)

Perhaps because the Knight News is a student newspaper serving CUNY’s Queens College, the questions as well as the answers have a fine practicality to them, by which I mean a “how-to” quality that is both informative and instructive. I do think that there are other questions that need to be asked, of the editors and reviewers, and I believe that literary bloggers, the good ones at least, have been trying to raise them as often as they can.