It’s Time for a More Inclusive Book Review

For more than a few years now, America’s literary community has been talking about the the gender imbalances that take place in mainstream book reviewing. Each year, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts compiles the data to show that male writers are still getting reviewed disproportionately in comparison to women writers; each year, the mainstream media sniffs at the so-called bean-counting approach to literary criticism and attempts to turn its deficiencies into strengths by claiming they’re focused on the books that “really will endure,” as former New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus put it.

I’ve talked about this a lot over the years. I’ve even described how, as a reviewer, I’ve fallen into the same traps despite my best efforts when I’m writing about books here or for other outlets. And the gender gap is only part of the problem: Though it’s gotten less media attention, some critics have pointed out that, if we look at the ethnic backgrounds of the writers getting reviewed by the mainstream press, it’s an awfully white looking field. So, after all this time spent clamoring for change and not seeing it, I began asking myself: What do I want to do about this?

Here’s what I came up with.

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20 January 2014 | uncategorized |

Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart

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photo: Brigitte Lacombe

Welcome to the first Life Stories of 2014! In this episode, I talk to Gary Shteyngart about Little Failure, his memoir of emigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union as a young child, and the ways he screwed up his life until he turned things around in his late 20s. As we discuss, he’s mined his life for his fiction before, from The Russian Debutante’s Handbook to Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, but this time around he’s confronting it head on, and I can tell you the results are entertaining and illuminating—already, the bar for memoir has been set high this year!

You can read excerpts from the interview at Buzzfeed—the first in what I hope will be a series of appearances for this podcast there. That depends to some extent on how popular it proves, so if you enjoy this episode, and want to tell your friends about it, please consider showing them the Buzzfeed link! Thanks.

Listen to Life Stories #58: Gary Shteyngart (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

18 January 2014 | life stories |