How to Write About Books

Page-Turner, The New Yorker’s new literary blog, launches today with the promise that it will feature “criticism, contention, and conversation about the most important books of the moment.” As a service to Page-Turner’s writers and editors, we’ve delved into archive and put together this light-hearted primer on the practice of literary journalism. We hope these suggestions prove helpful.

1. Disregard Child-Labor Laws

In 1927, James Thurber published a short humor piece made up of reviews of famous books by readers aged between nine and fourteen. Here’s what Junior Diggins (thirteen) had to say about W. E. Woodward’s “George Washington, The Image and the Man”:

Mr. Woodward shows that was all crazy about that cherry tree. But I don’t think old George crossed the Dellawear in December either just to go to Trenton if you been to Trenton.

Anyways if George cut the tree down his father would say you did did you so how would you like a sock in the eye. Because its better to tell fibs and your father wont worry. It shows president Washington was the father of his country and he knew a lot of ladies his wife didn’t.

2. Use Cheap Imports

Donald Barthelme’s 1981 “Challenge” (published under the pseudonym William White) explained how the “sleek, space-efficient” Japanese book review replaced the “big, clunky” American review:

The soul of the Japanese review, rooted in the concept of Ma, or space interfacing with time, was large, forthright, ultra-modern, yet warm. It was a soul that consumers found agreeable, spread out all over the coffee table on a Sunday morning, and one that wore its technology lightly, like a plastic raincoat. At the same time, bench tests of the new Japanese reviews disclosed a ferocious efficiency.

The Nalamichi Model 500, for instance, was capable of deconstructing a book of average length in seven seconds, with 0.5 per cent distortion, signal-to-noise ratio of 124 db, and a damping factor of 60—a technological feat well beyond the capability of any U.S. reviews. American notices tended to be handwritten, typically by either John Kenneth Galbraith or Joyce Carol Oates.

3. Explore the Minutiae

During the 1962-63 newspaper strike, St. Clair McKelway put together “A Cluster of All-Purpose Book Reviews” for those readers who missed their Sunday book supplements. Here’s a passage from his review of new publications on the Civil War:

Turner Florsheim and Albert Cordovan … have come up with completely fresh and diverting accounts of, respectively, the shoes Grant wore in and out of combat, and the shoes Lee wore both in wartime and peacetime. Interestingly enough, Florsheim appears to have obliterated for all time the erroneous assumption that because Grant wore 10-Cs at Culpeper, that was the size of shoe he always wore. From old documents and with the help of a shoe-measuring stick of the most modern variety, Florsheim establishes beyond much doubt that the reason Grant wore 10-Cs at Culpeper was simply that he had developed severe corns at Rattleberry and that, once he was able to rest his extremities in a cave under Culpeper during the conflict, he went back to his usual 10-Bs.

4. Fictionalize

Stanislaw Lem’s 1978 short story “Odds” (translated by Michael Kandel) takes the form of a review of two imaginary books on probability by Professor Cezar Kouska. The reviewer, in an existential mood, considers what Kouska has to say about the slim chances of anyone ever being born: