With the (50th) anniversary being celebrated last year there's been lots of coverage of The New York Review of Books, and it's carrying over into 2014 -- including abroad (see Patrick Bahners' (German) Q & A with Robert Silvers in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example (and note the picture they use to go along with the piece ...)).
In The Chronicle Review Russell Jacoby now offers an overview of The Graying of 'The New York Review of Books' -- giving the periodical/institution: "a mixed report card".
While Jacoby doesn't address the NYRB's much-maligned out-of-whack sex ratio (very few of the reviews are by women) nor what irritates me most about it -- the relative lack of coverage of works of fiction (non- outnumber fiction reviews by a ridiculous amount) -- he does have a few issues with it, summing up:
The concern over what happens next ("Silvers is 83", Jacoby notes) -- especially given how little effort has been put into rejuvenation -- is of course ever more pressing.
(Worth noting also, however, -- and Jacoby devotes good space to it -- : "Except for a year or two in the mid-60s, the NYRB has always turned a profit". That is damn impressive, regardless of how it is accomplished.)
While Jacoby doesn't address the NYRB's much-maligned out-of-whack sex ratio (very few of the reviews are by women) nor what irritates me most about it -- the relative lack of coverage of works of fiction (non- outnumber fiction reviews by a ridiculous amount) -- he does have a few issues with it, summing up:
Apart from its prolix and cautious reviews, what troubles about the NYRB is its insularity, Anglophilism, devotion to New York-based writers, and love affair with Ivy League-chaired professors. But most troubling of all is the absence of a younger generation.(I'd suggest that one rare exception of an outsider whose career was basically made (at least outside his native India) at the NYRB is Pankaj Mishra, who debuted in 1998 with 'Edmund Wilson in Benares' (reworked, in a fashion, in his novel, The Romantics); however, looking through the archives I note with some surprise how he must have already been on their radar: his Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, published at that time only in an Indian edition, was mentioned in not one but two earlier NYRB pieces, by Ian Buruma and Roderick MacFarquhar).)
The concern over what happens next ("Silvers is 83", Jacoby notes) -- especially given how little effort has been put into rejuvenation -- is of course ever more pressing.
(Worth noting also, however, -- and Jacoby devotes good space to it -- : "Except for a year or two in the mid-60s, the NYRB has always turned a profit". That is damn impressive, regardless of how it is accomplished.)