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Staff News at the Book Review

Tina Jordan becomes the new deputy editor, and David Kelly will take on the new role of managing editor. In addition, writes Pamela Paul, Elisabeth Egan is joining on a permanent basis as a preview editor.

We are excited to announce new roles for two current editors and a new hire at the Book Review this month.

Tina Jordan , who joined the Book Review as a preview editor in 2018 and fast made her mark, will become the new deputy editor of the Book Review. She added new columns; broadened coverage in thrillers, romance and historical fiction; mined the Times archives for stories like the deathbed watch of Walt Whitman and “ Oops! Famously Scathing Reviews From The Times’s Archives ”; unleashed her love of literary maps ; and has become a welcome regular presence on the Book Review podcast, among other entrepreneurial ventures on the desk. Before joining The Times, Tina was the longtime books editor at Entertainment Weekly, where she worked since the magazine’s founding over a quarter-century ago. She edited all of the magazine’s book coverage, overseeing not just reviews but features and publishing industry news, assigning some of the very first United States coverage of J. K. Rowling, for example. She also served as the host of a weekly hourlong Sirius show “Off the Books,” devoted to author interviews. Tina began her career at Simon & Schuster.

David Kelly , who has been with the Book Review since 1985, will take on the new role of managing editor. The Book Review would not properly run without David, who is not only a standout previewer, having assigned books on the arts, sports, music, politics, literary criticism and biography to critics ranging from John Adams to Frank Rich to Elaine Blair, but is also an expert critic in his own right. In his new role, David will oversee and manage the team’s digital and print workflow, as well as take on more assigning, and if we’re lucky, write more reviews for us himself.

Elisabeth Egan , a much-admired fixture in the book world and true literary enthusiast, will be joining the Book Review as a preview editor after filling in for Gal Beckerman who is on book leave. Elisabeth is the author of “A Window Opens,” a novel told from the perspective of a lifelong book lover. She was Glamour’s books editor for six years and was the co-writer and co-host of “Broken Harts,” a narrative nonfiction podcast about two mothers who drove their six children off a cliff in 2018. She is a former senior editor at Amazon Publishing and books editor at Self magazine, and earlier in her career worked at both Workman Publishing and Simon & Schuster. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Glamour, O, Real Simple and People. Liz knows very well how to love a book and how to tell it like it is when she doesn’t . We’re delighted to have her join us now on a permanent basis.

Please join me and the rest of the Books desk in congratulating Liz, Tina and David on their new roles at the Book Review.

Explore Further

Jaime green joins book review as a romance columnist, changes in the books department.

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10 Things You Didn’t Know About How the NY Times Book Review Works

Pamela paul on what goes into those pesky year-end lists.

Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review , hopped on reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about the Book Review and the recently published list of their editors’ picks for the 10 best books of the year . In addition to recommending a number of great books and writers (Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell, George Eliot, and more), dubbing Colson Whitehead one of the greatest novelists of our time, and suggesting that, of the Times ‘s Top 10, a Trump supporter might most enjoy The North Water , Paul shed a little light on how things work at the Book Review (a question that some of us have been asking ourselves lately!). Below, find a few things you may or may not have known about how books are assigned, reviewed, and considered for the year-end lists of the paper of record.

Way more books come out every year than you think.

“The Book Review at The Times reviews about 1% of the books that come out in any given year.”

Planning for the Year-End Notable Books List starts in January.

“Basically, the entire year is a winnowing process that culminates in the 10 Best Books. We start thinking about it in January. As we see books that we think are true standouts, we put copies aside so that all editors can read through contenders throughout the year, and weigh in. Books come on and off that list of contenders, and in the course of the year, we check in on it periodically and update it, depending on how people respond to individual titles. Toward the end of the year, around October, the process becomes more intense. I would describe the overall system as democratic, with a decisive wielding of the autocratic sword at the end. Ultimately, hard decisions have to be made, and not every editor at the Book Review will end up with all his or her favorites on the final list, but will hopefully have at least one book he or she lobbied hard for make the final cut.”

“Each week, we go through the previous issue and denote certain books as ‘Editor’s Choices’—these are the 9 books we especially like from that issue. At the end of the year, we pull together all of our Editor’s Choices and narrow them down to 100 Notable Books of the Year—50 fiction and 50 nonfiction. From those, we pick the 10 Best.”

The Book Review editors are probably hanging out right now.

“At The New York Times Book Review , we have no staff critics—we are all editors and we sit together and we talk all the time. I like to get up and walk around and have actual-human-contact with people. Our staff critics at The Times mostly work from home, though they do come in and we do talk to them, often on the phone. We are all people who like to talk about books, and having conversations around them—what books are you seeing, what looks good, what are you hearing, what do you like—are things we could talk about all day. Except we also have to read. And write. And edit.

Book reviews are generally a top-down process.

“Here at the Book Review , the editors select which books we want reviewed, and then we find reviewers to write about them. We review all genres, though our tastes reflect the tastes of our editors and those of readers of The New York Times . The staff critics for The Times choose which books they want to review themselves.”

“Each editor here handles a number of titles in a given week. They will come up with a list of possible reviewers and then bring it to my deputy and me. We then talk them over and sometimes add our own names to the list. Then we establish the order in which we approach people with the assignment. Sometimes, the first person on our list is too busy or has a conflict of interest (knows the author, shares an agent, blurbed an earlier book of theirs, etc.) and is disqualified, so we move to the next person on the list. In terms of finding reviewers, we are always on the lookout for smart new voices. Sometimes we find these among new authors, sometimes writers in other publications, sometimes people reach out to us directly with clips and a description of the kinds of books they’re interested in reviewing and their areas of expertise.”

There is lots of mail (you probably actually knew this).

“We have our mail opened several times a day. On most days, we have three large carts piled high with boxes and envelopes, plus 10-20 Postal Boxes filled to the top. So picture that!

There is a (loose) definition for “Best Books.”

“I like to think [the ten best books of the year] have little in common other than a high standard of ambition and excellence. By “Best Books,” we mean books that are extremely well executed in every sense: the scope of the work, originality of thought, writing on a sentence level, storytelling. It’s not necessarily about which books have the most “important” message or a position we agree with. It’s about books we think will stand the test of time, and that people will want to read 5, 10, 20 years from now.”

End of the year lists can have nothing to do with how books were reviewed.

“It is often the case that books we like don’t necessarily get hugely favorable notice in the Book Review . One recent case: Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See got a negative review in the Book Review . But we still named it one of the 10 Best Books of the year at the time. Our 10 Best is when we editors get to exert our own opinions, no matter what our reviewers say.”

The best book reviews are emotional.

“I think the biggest mistake reviewers make is conflating a book review with a book report. Generally speaking, readers don’t want to know what happens in a book, and they certainly don’t want (nor should they get) plot spoilers. I hate that personally as a reader! Let me discover for myself. What I’m more interested in a review is seeing a writer engage with a book—intellectually and often, emotionally. I want some depth and context: What else has been written on the subject? What has this writer done previously? What kind of research did the writer do? I want to know what the writing is like—give me some examples, quote from the book, describe the style. I want to know what the writer does well and not so well. I want judgment. I want to know if a book is well done and if it’s worth my time. Is this a book I’ll actually want to read, or just read about? Hopefully, at least ONE of those things.”

Don DeLillo might have been in the Top 10 this year.

“ Zero K was one of the finalists! Almost made it.”

When it comes to reading, Pamela Paul is just like us.

“One year, when I didn’t have a job and I didn’t have a partner and I didn’t have kids and before the Internet, I read 76 books for fun, including “Moby-Dick.” That hasn’t happened since. I try to read a book a week, but big books sure do slow you down. As does life. The big sacrifice is TV; I never get to watch TV.”

“I’ve always wanted to read Dumas—one of those authors I’ve never actually gotten around to. But I also think life is too short to finish a bad book, unless you’re really getting something out of it.”

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‘New York Times’ Reveals Its Best Books of 2021

BY Michael Schaub • Nov. 29, 2021

The New York Times Book Review unveiled its list of the 10 best books of the year , with titles by Honorée Fannone Jeffers, Patricia Lockwood, and Clint Smith among those making the cut.

Jeffers was honored for her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois , which was a finalist for this year’s Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award.

Lockwood made the list for her Booker Prize-finalist No One Is Talking About This , while Imbolo Mbue was honored for her novel How Beautiful We Were . The other two works of fiction selected by the Times were Intimacies by Katie Kitamura and the genre-defying When We Cease To Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West. Kitamura’s novel made the National Book Award fiction longlist, while Labatut’s book was on the prize’s translated literature shortlist.

Smith’s How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , also longlisted for the National Book Award,was one of the nonfiction books to make the Times list, along with Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth .

Other nonfiction books on the list included Andrea Elliott’s Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival and Hope in an American City and Tove Ditlevsen’s memoir cycle,  The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood; Youth; Dependency , translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman.

Rounding out the list was Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath . The biography, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, was published in 2020; when asked on Twitter why it was named one of the Times’ notable books of 2021, Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul explained , “We used to make the cut after the Holiday issue and carry the titles over [to the] following year. Moving forward, it’s the full calendar year.”

Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.

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