New York Times Book Review

Discusses current literary trends in several features about books and authors: paperback talk, spring and fall review of new books, and children’s and Christmas issues.Sold each week both separately and as part of the Sunday New York Times, the Book Review divides the published world into two parts for easy consumption: nonfiction, and fiction and poetry. There is no attempt to be comprehensive. Although scholarly books are regularly reviewed, the sort of thing chosen is likely to be no more arcane than a cultural history of Halloween or a new biography of Jesse James, along with, say, the memoirs of David Rockefeller. The reader of the Book Review can also expect to find the latest novel by Joyce Carol Oates or Pat Conroy as well as the efforts of one or two first novelists and the new book of poems by Billy Collins. What distinguishes the reviews from those of your hometown Sunday newspaper are principally three things: there are more of them (each issue runs some 20 pages), they are likely to be more searching and more critical (often the reviewers are at least as well-known as the authors reviewed), and each review has behind it the authority of the New York Times itself, whose cultural as well as political clout is simply unmatched in American life. For a book to sell, it doesn’t necessarily have to be considered in the Book Review. For a book to be taken seriously, it probably does–and readers who take themselves seriously invariably read the Book Review. –Terry Caesar