Dear Young Reviewer
Written by Edward ChampionPosted on May 16, 2008
Filed Under Uncategorized
Dear Young Reviewer:
Thank you so much for writing in! Your writing samples are acceptable, which is saying something, seeing as how they’ve been published on one of those goddam blogs. However, we are under constraints to reduce our expenses and demonstrate to our shareholders that we can turn this rag into a profitable joint. Sure, we could compensate you for some piddling price that reflects the wages of someone who works in an export processing zone. But desperate times have had us thinking outside the box. Therefore, I hope that we can insult your intelligence by selling you on a new idea.
As you know, Books Daily is one of the most important publications for books. Sometimes, we even put a star next to a review! In a mere 100 words, we feel that we can encapsulate a book’s essence. Therefore, any reviews assigned after June 15 will undergo a stunning new business model: one that I believe you’ll find acceptable under the circumstances. Instead of paying you to review the book, we’d like you to pay us at the rate of $25 per review. Please know that we value the work you do for us. We value it so highly that we really think that you should be paying us at this juncture. Your astute reading and writing are what make our magazine so valuable in the industry and we regret this necessary action. All of us here are experiencing change. Some of us, in fact, are sleeping with the money men so that we can pay our rent. This is the only way we can justify our jobs as our magazine remains on the selling block. Our offices have, in fact, become a haven for drug trafficking. We figure that if we can’t hook the kids on books, we can certainly hook them on a particularly addictive form of Ketamine.
But we trust that you’ll understand why we’re doing this. After all, if you’re willing to expend seven to ten hours on a book and write a capsule on it for $25 (wow, you’re working for a mere $2.50/hour!), then surely you’re willing to pay us for the privilege of writing in our esteemed pages.
And just so you have an extra incentive, we’ll be happy to ship you some Benzadrine and other sleep supressants so that you can finish up your reviews for us. Hell, we’ll even give you a 10% discount if you’d like to buy any drugs.
With your modest financial sacrifice, we are committed to being the gold standard in book reviewing. And we hope that you will continue to enjoy our metaphorical violation of your pristine orifice. We really appreciate the way you’re stretching it out for us.
Very truly yours,
Sara Craven
Editor, BOOKS DAILY
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Books To Jump Up and Down Over
Beyond Heaving Bosoms by Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan. The famed writers behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books have written a very funny and thoughtful volume about romances, both Old Skool and New Skool. Here is a book that any smug and humorless literary manboy beating his flabby passive chest over Banville or Bolano should probably read pronto, if only for the distant possibility that he might get over himself. While the Choose Your Own Adventure segment at the end caused me to have a very disturbing dream involving Shelley Long (don't ask), Sarah and Candy did have me rethinking many of my own misperceptions when I wasn't busy laughing. They're not afraid to take on the New York Times Bok Review or even the groupthink within certain sectors of the romance community.
Alice Fantastic by Maggie Estep. This wild and highly enjoyable narrative involves two sisters (presumably, the third one was still being rented out by Chekhov), a hippie ex-junkie mother who lives with seventeen dogs, a murder, gambling, and libidinous Hollywood actresses who live in Woodstock. But this is the wonderful Maggie Estep we're talking here. And what seems at first like a quirky yarn becomes something unexpectedly moving about connectivity. What I love about Estep's work is the way that she'll juxtapose an extremely astute observation (now that you mention it, why do cab drivers always have somebody to talk with on the phone past midnight?) with an often outrageous story development.
Generosity by Richard Powers. It doesn't come out until September 29th, but Richard Powers's latest will have anyone committed to books reconsidering their literary fervor. I foresee some animosity from the vanilla critics hostile to idea-driven novels, but book bloggers, YouTube chroniclers, and MFAs would do well to plunge into this chance-taking narrative, which introduces vital questions about what the reader's relationship is with media, scientific dissection, and "creative nonfiction." Are we rats fleeing to happy cities? Or can we find the humanism within the purported plague?
Pieces for the Left Hand by J. Robert Lennon. Lennon is one of the most underrated fiction writers working today. Much as On the Night Plain proved that Lennon had a lot more in the toolbox than heartfelt (and often very funny) suburban satire, this slim but fascinating volume juxtaposes 100 small-town anecdotes -- arranged by category -- in a manner that reads, at times, like Nicholson Baker's passions for minutiae and, at other times, Stewart O'Nan's concern for psychological detail. The result is fiction that makes us wonder about whether one person's subjective view of particulars can entirely be trusted. This book never found a publisher in 2005. But thankfully, Graywolf has released it in the United States, along with Lennon's latest novel, The Castle.
Wonderful World by Javier Calvo. This wonderfully raucous volume has been completely ignored by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. But it's probably one of the most delightful reading experiences I've had this year. Calvo cavalierly mashes up multiple genres and manages to mix up familial subtext with larger-than-life, almost cartoonish characters. (Indeed, one might argue that one mobster's penis is a character of its own in this sprawling novel.). This is not an easy thing to pull off, but Calvo makes it work. And it's helped immeasurably by Mara Faye Lethem's idiom-specific translation. (See longer post.)
The Means of Reproduction, Michelle Goldberg This thoughtful book tackles the complicated (and little discussed) subject of reproductive rights from numerous angles, which includes a number of unpleasant but necessary ones. The upshot is that there isn't a quick fix solution for declining birth rates and fundamentalist abuses. Just about every political faction has contributed to the friction. But you'll want to read this book anyway to refamiliarize yourself with the topic, but also to understand just what's occurred during the past several decades to get us where we are today. (See also podcast interview with Goldberg.)
Or send materials to:
315 Flatbush Avenue, #231
Brooklyn, NY 11217
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Way to go, Ed! I was a reviewer for Publishers Weekly in what I didn’t realize was the Good Old Days, when we were paid a princely $45 a pop–for 200 whole words. I wrote about this in The “Gold Standard” Pays with Dross.
Cheers,
Bella
You didn’t put up a link to Books Daily and I cant find one on google,please tell me how i can review for them!!!