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Comment by returningfory2 | Hacker News Reader

Having a "clubby" culture is one explanation, but another factor could be that the NYRB just gets very high profile contributors. For example Zadie Smith has written essays for the NYRB, while also being the subject of reviews. Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them?

I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.

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It's a positive feedback loop: an author becomes high profile by getting positive reviews in the NYRB -> they become more likely to contribute to the NYRB -> they become more likely to get more positive reviews, and so on. Literature is especially cliquey--almost all the most famous writers are based out of hubs like New York, London, Paris. How many authors get passed over just because they happen to live somewhere else? There are so many books released every year that it would be impossible for any one publication to review them all. So instead of a curation of the best authors, publications like this inevitably just become a curation of authors who are in the club.

Don Thompson gets after this from another angle in "The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art". The particular thread I'm thinking of is the purchases of Charles Saatchi. It looks externally like there's a positive feedback loop where he collects you, which makes you famous, which makes your work valuable, which he can then sell. But ... if you look at the average value of work in Saatchi's collection, it asymptotically approaches $0. The man buys a lot of art. Warehouses full of stuff that hasn't been seen. Similarly, there are a lot of poor writers in New York. Is there a positive feedback loop? Try measuring it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0230620590

> Literature is especially cliquey--almost all the most famous writers are based out of hubs like New York, London, Paris.

Is this true?

Smith, discussed in the parent, sure, born and lives in London. In general, I have a suspicion this concentration is more true of British authors than American ones, although the most recent one I can think of that came to fame is...

Sally Rooney? Ireland.

Naming a few other famous novelists I've heard of in the last several years, and doing some quick Googling... trying to stick to "literary" ones:

Franzen? Santa Cruz

Knausgård? Sweden + London. Looks like it was only London after he got famous, though.

Ferrante? Heh, well, famously nobody knows for sure, but seems like people believe Italy.

Stephen King? Maine until very recently. Go further into genre content and we get out of the point of the "literature" discussion here, though.

I'm looking at novelists vs columnists both because of the example given of Smith and because novelists are less geographically constrained than someone whose day job is to write for a publication that historically has been based in those cities, to try to avoid "once you're in the club you get the job that makes you move to the city" factors.

The relevant term here is "coterie", and I think the key is that it's easier to find and become part of one in the hub cities, not that they don't exist in a more attenuated form elsewhere.

See this article for a discussion of the dynamics

https://www.academia.edu/2763450/The_New_Coterie_Writing_Com...

Zadie Smith lived in New York from the late 2000's to 2020.

Well writing novels is something that people who grow up in New York aspire to do more than people who grow up elsewhere, and those from elsewhere with those ambitions often move to places like New York.

Seems like there's scope for building local literature review communities (or book clubs lol) but that properly review local authors.. The interesting question for me would be how this system works

You can't compete against "New York" or "London" on locality terms. They just have so many more people in a small area; they're an implicit link farm. To build something up that can challenge the literary mainstream, you've got to align on something else.

I do think something like this is already happening, but along genre lines. Twenty years ago, self-publishing was a last resort option for people who were mostly writing perma-slush. Ten years ago, it was an admissible strategy for certain genres but still considered an undesirable way to go for most authors. Five years ago, it had become a respectable alternative (in part, due to consolidation-induced dysfunction in trade publishing). Now, we're starting to see self-publishing take over literary fiction [1] as well.

This isn't necessary good news--to self-publishing properly is expensive, beyond what most people can afford; and traditional houses are now able to farm out their risk unto authors--so much as it is a mix of good and bad, but the scene is changing and I think the New York literati are already under 20% of peak relevance (midcentury). They confer a bit of prestige, but they don't actually get you read, and they certainly don't get you read deeply, which is what you want if you want your books to still be read 20 years from now.

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[1] I'll skip over the long, long debate over "What is literary fiction?" That would add 3 kilowords to this post, just to define terms.

>I'll skip over the long, long debate over "what is literary fiction?" that would add 3 kilowords to this post, just to define terms.

I'll bite:

Self-publishing began as an option for publishing books that nobody reads, evolved over time into a viable option for publishing books that some people would read, and finally reached the high status of being an option for publishing books that nobody reads.

Brutal, but not entirely false.

There is something to be said for writing a book that people claim to have read, though.

And further, that people buy and don't read.

Sanderson's very succesful suprise foray into self-publishing has probably caught the attention of genre leading authors and I expect more to follow.

That makes a lot of sense

> I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.

In fact, how else are you going to find qualified reviewers but to find people who were reviewed well? Does it make sense to get people whose works are bad to review other people's?

Smith's NYRB essay 'Generation Why?,' is essential reading IMO [0].

She nicely explains how so many bright, hardworking folks can end up optimizing on goals that made sense to, e.g., a 20 year old college dropout, but that might not produce much social value overall. Considering when she wrote it, the essay is downright prophetic.

The general point about the magazine being a venue for "elitist, East coast, alternative, intellectual, left-winged" [1] authors to write to and about each other is well taken. But I don't think they just got lucky in featuring ZS, I think they make an active effort to get good authors writing on important topics.

In some circumstances, nepotism and meritocracy might be observationally equivalent [2].

[0] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/

[1] https://twitter.com/30_rock_quotes/status/7699430022?lang=en

[2] I think it was Gary King who said this, on the subject of how top ranked political science departments dominate the job market, but I can't find the exact quote.

Thanks for linking that article, fascinating read! It's incredible how much an article from 2010 (over a decade ago!) can resonate with how I feel about social media today and easily put the vague discomforts I've felt about it into words.

> I'm sure you could run the same experiment with e.g. prestigious math journals. There is probably a significant overlap between authors and reviewers.

These are completely different matters. Any idiot can have an opinion on just about any non-academic literature. Whether any idiot can be taken seriously is up to debate. Whereas for math papers, there are very few people outside the pool of authors who can understand enough of it to even have an opinion.

I assure you having an opinion has nothing to do with competence.

So you claim that reviewing books requires no skill or that this skill is not correlated with being a prestigious author?

Strategic reviewing, especially when it comes to funding requests, is not really unknown in academic circles, at least in the social sciences and humanities.

> Does this mean Zadie Smith is a part of the club? Or that NYRB is just able to get high profile authors like Smith to write for them?

Uh, I don't see the difference

I think some might read the original question as saying that the books reviewed wouldn't be reviewed unless they were contributors. Zadie Smith's books would get reviewed whether she'd contributed or not, but she still counts towards the "clubby" total.

Oh OK that makes sense. I thought "part of the club" as in "club of high profile authors"

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