Fiction Coverage Still Declining

Again, the Literary Saloon notices that the major magazines aren't giving us much.

Seriously, though, what's up with TNR? I keep expecting to hear about a press release saying Martin Peretz has decided to disband literary coverage all together. Anyway, here's the money quote:

Yesterday we received the new issue of The New Republic -- 'The Environmental Issue' -- and found yet again: three in-depth reviews, none of which covered any fiction titles. What the hell is going on there ? (The reviews are of a volume the correspondence of Tadeusz Borowski, Ryszard Kapuscinski's Travels with Herodotus (yes, yes, you could call that ... a stretch of the imagination close to fiction), and a bunch of Jamestown-related titles (all of which, we also note, also has precious little to do with anything environmental ...).

       If this is what the loss of James Woods means for them -- Leon Wieseltier going non-fiction ga-ga -- then his bolting for The New Yorker comes at a higher cost than we ever imagined. (Today too we received our renewal notice for our TNR subscription, and while we have a few more weeks to mull that over we're considerably more iffy about pulling out the checkbook if this is the way it's going to be.)

       But either James Wood hasn't gotten to The New Yorker yet or they've gone off the deep end too: this week's issue -- 'The Style Issue' (and yes, we swear if we get another theme-issue in our mailbox this week we will just rip it in half unread) -- weighs in at a healthy 190 pages, but while The New Republic managed to at least pack some book coverage into their (by comparison) flimsy 56-page issue, all The New Yorker can offer this week as far as book-coverage goes is a very flimsy 'Briefly Noted' page (two columns, the third taken over by advertising, only four books 'discussed').

       Amazingly enough, it is once again The New York Times Book Review that keeps us from despairing completely . . .

Dire straits indeed. Well, good thing that there's so much serious fiction coverage popping up online.