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BEATRICE

"Unlike many bloggers, Hogan maintains a civil tone in his critiques, thereby upping his credibility factor."
(February 2004)


"The best lit bloggers are keen and devoted readers, witty gossips and perceptive critics of the book industry. The worst lit bloggers sound like what you'd get if you seated the title characters from Heathers around the Algonquin Round Table and gave them a photo of Zadie Smith on a bad hair day. Ron Hogan... stays on the right side of that line."
(October 2004)

New York Daily News
"Beatrice is a daily read for people in the publishing world..."
(July 2005)

Elizabeth Hand
"Litblogs like Beatrice aren't the wave of the future, they're the wave of the present. Any writer who ignores that fact does so at her/his peril."
(May 2007)

The Millions
"Beatrice is probably my favorite of all the litblogs. Hogan touches on all the big stories with humor..."
(September 2004)

Booksquare.com
"Regular Beatrice readers know the blog frequently discusses chicklit - their fair appraisal of the subject is refreshing, especially because men often don't write about women's fiction with any sort of understanding."
(October 2004)

National Poetry Almanac
"...combines sharp wit with journalistic discipline to cast an unflinching eye at the often soap-operatic literary publishing industry."
(November 2004)

About the Editor


photo by Miriam Berkley
ronhogan.jpg

The Basics

Ron Hogan is the author of The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane, a visual tribute to '70s Hollywood that Publishers Weekly called "one of the year's most fun" coffee table books. In addition to editing (and writing a good chunk of) Beatrice, he reports on the publishing industry for mediabistro.com's Galleycat.

The Long Version

Shortly after the 1994 launch of Beatrice, most of the editors realized that editing a zine took work, and Ron Hogan was quickly left holding down the fort. Not wishing to subject himself to an unrelenting stream of bad short stories and poetry, he promptly scuttled the original editorial mission and began interviewing his favorite writers, starting with James Ellroy.

He's kept the site up (if not always active) ever since, even during a two-year stint as the nonfiction and history book review editor for Amazon.com. At one point, his boss asked him to choose between the job and the website, and since he liked the website better, he started making plans to leave as soon as he'd earned his next round of stock options. Two weeks later they slashed the department by 20 percent and sent him home with all his money, so he's pretty sure he got the best of that deal.

He moved to New York in the summer of 2000, and though the subsequent year or so was one of Beatrice's busiest periods ever, he eventually hit a wall. Unable to find the motivation to work much on the site when the recession was at its worst, then unable to find the time when his freelance writing career picked up once again, he decided at the end of 2003 to switch over to the blog format all the kids are using nowadays, hoping it would revitalize the site—and, so far, it has. Today he is frequently asked to speak to authors and publishing professionals about the bookblog phenomenon and how it will transform their industry.

Ron Hogan
photo by Mrs. Beatrice