How to review books for the New York Times

Between 2021 and 2023, I had an eighteen-month stint as a book reviewer and literary essayist who wrote for periodicals like The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tablet, The Chronicle Review, The Rumpus, and...probably some other places I’ve forgotten about.

I got into this field by writing a seven thousand word essay that I pitched to various periodicals (as an aside, 'pitching' means emailing email editors saying 'I have an idea for a piece, would you like to publish this').¹

At the time I didn’t know you’re not supposed to pitch an already-completed piece, so it was no surprise most of my emails got ignored. I also had no clue who to pitch. Every time I wrote to someone they either ignored it, or they told me they weren't a "commissioning editor", whatever that meant.

But, thankfully, somebody at the LA Review of Books forwarded my piece to the editor in chief, Boris Dralyuk, who accepted it. The piece went viral online and became their highest-read piece of 2021. I then published a few other pieces with LARB, always on the same model (I would write the piece beforehand, then pitch it to Boris).

During this time, I attempted to break into other journals using this same method, and...it sometimes worked: I got into LitHub at least. But mostly I got back silence. It just really felt like something about what I was doing really was not working. There was too much friction. Even when editors accepted pieces, they often felt hesitant, and I had to badger them to finally hit publish.

Eventually, Boris left LARB, and I fought with the next editor, so my primary outlet was gone. Then my Substack started taking off, I retired from pitching.

However, during this eighteen-month period, I had a really productive chat with Irina Dumitrescu, a literary critic and Medieval literature professor who regularly writes for The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review. She had somehow cracked the code! She was regularly writing for all the outlets that were ignoring me.

We spoke over Twitter DMs, as I recall, and she was very generous in sharing about how the pitching process worked, what editors were looking for, and how to start getting traction with publications.

Although I didn't end up using a lot of her knowledge, I was very thankful she took the time.

Now Irina is on Substack, and I am also friends on Substack with a number of writers who would love to do things like review books for the New York Times. As such, I thought it'd be fun to interview her about how an aspiring book reviewer and literary essayist can break into the "having thoughts about literature" business.

As always with my interviews, I conducted the interview over Zoom and typed out my notes, which I have transcribed below. During the interview, I asked questions throughout, but I've removed them from the transcript except where it's necessary to provide context. With these interviews I also always give the subject the opportunity to revise the transcript, and they usually have a few edits, which was true for Irina as well.

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The Interview

How would you describe what you do?

If you catch me in a serious moment, I would say it's teaching and research by other means. When we teach, we often make things a bit more accessible and understandable and find ways to connect books to our students’ lives and experiences. And when we do scholarship, we sometimes make things abstract and difficult to understand, but most of us are capable of talking about literature in a way that intelligent people find it possible to follow.

Reviewing books is a way for me to keep reading and researching and sometimes step outside my disciplinary boundaries. And it’s a way to find ways to connect literature to other ideas, or to life, just as I would in the classroom.

When I'm not being so serious, I'd say this really took off for me when corona started, and I had a kid at home, and I was department chair, and I was afraid I'd stop reading altogether, so I used book reviews as a way to keep reading.

It's very much a side gig for me. It doesn't pay the bills, and it couldn't pay the bills. It's something that has given me freedom and pleasure and time for my own intellectual life that could very easily disappear under other pressures.

I think I started writing for the public maybe around 2010 or 2011. And I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know it yet. And the way I figured it out was that I was really jealous of writers. Disgustingly envious of writers. But then I found out about this event in Texas, the New Braunfels Wurstfest. I found out about the annual “salute to sausage.” So I went with two friends to this sausage festival. And one of my colleagues ran the Southwest Review, and he said if you wrote about, I'll publish it.

I wrote a glib, sarcastic piece. He gave me a good, short edit, and he pushed me to go deeper. He asked me, “Who is this writer? Why should I care?” So I rewrote the essay to be about migration and food and how people use the ingredients they find in their new country to make the dishes that remind them of home. And he published this piece, which made me super happy. But I still kept my public-facing writing on the down-low.

I wrote other pieces about food. I took a pitching course online. I landed a piece in the Atlantic Online that was about bad food. I was mostly writing about food at the time. It was topics that had nothing to do with my academic work.

And then what happened was an editor for the LA Review of Books asked if I would consider a book review, and I just looked at what was forthcoming on Amazon. I suggested one of the titles I found there, and she agreed. She got me a copy. And I had a lot of fun, and the copy editor complimented me on the piece, and he said you should do more of this.

I said okay. So then I started pitching more stuff. I just started doing it. I had taken a pitching course. It was a lot of emails being ignored, then sometimes getting a bite. Slowly I started to get into more places. I think that was seven years ago or so, I'd have to look it up.

Another thing I did, I was in a lot of writer's groups on Facebook. And one of the ones I was in was dedicated to racking up a hundred rejections in a year. So I thought okay, I'm going to get over my fear of rejection. I pitched a bunch of places I would never have pitched before, and one of them was the NYT. They sent around my email amongst the staff, and six months later one of them came to me with something completely different to review. That's how I got into the New York Times—it was really because I was trying to rack up rejections.

Originally, your essays and book reviews weren't related to your academic work, which is about medieval literature. But nowadays it seems like you often write about things related to your specialty.

That happened when I started writing for the TLS--they sent me some things that were medieval. I started to write about a few medieval books, in the context of many other topics, such as dance and writing. At one point I did break into the LRB after a number of tries, and they tended to be very much geared towards my specialty too--they want someone who's an expert in the subject who's writing about it. And they have tended to give me assignments that are all medieval. And then other editors have seen that and given me assignments in that area.

That wasn't my choice—that was what editors gave me.

What are editors looking for?

I can't say I've figured that out either. With review pitching, it's different, because you haven't even seen the book. That's the tricky thing, so if you were doing a pitch on some other topic, you'd do a little research first, and you'd pitch the story. There's a certain art that freelancers have to doing that kind of preliminary research.

With reviews, it's a little complicated, because some papers want to run the review when the book comes out, which means you need to know about the book beforehand, which means you have to get your hands on a review copy and file the piece, usually some months before it comes out. But some places will be fine with a book that's already out, and usually it's pretty easy to tell which places are like that by checking if their reviews are of books coming out that week, or books that have been out for some months or even years.

Each paper has its own culture of how it makes assignments. Editors get a sense for working with people, what kind of book and reviewer combo will be interesting on the page.

In the case of the New York Times, they have the most rigorous conflict of interest rules I've encountered anywhere—you can't have any relationship to the author or to the publisher. That cuts out a lot of people, so the NYT often tends to look for someone who's a little off, a little unexpected, as a reviewer. I think they need a pool of reviewers who aren't somehow in a conflict of interest with other writers or their publishers. So they're going to do it in quite a different way from a paper that has a stable of medieval people and who figures that everyone in the field knows each other.

I have no idea what separates a pitch that gets accepted versus one that doesn't. Sometimes editors want to pair a few books on a single theme. For places that do longer essay pieces, you can pitch a few books that are recent and on a similar topic. Of course, they might already have someone on one of those books, and you just can't know that. But honestly I think the hardest part is breaking in to begin with. You just have to write some pieces and make them good. And once you're in, you can sort of propose yourself, and it's much less formal than a typical pitch the way a freelancer would do it. Sometimes I just propose a few titles and why I’m interested in them, and see whether it catches the editor’s interest.

Where should people start out pitching?

I think right now there are a whole bunch of smaller book review journals, such as the LA Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books. And one option that people don't think of are literary journals.² If you've already written the piece, that wouldn't work for most papers or magazines, but that would work for a literary journal. When it comes to most periodicals—sometimes people talk to me, and they're trying to submit an already-written piece, and that just doesn't work at most places.

One could also try papers, from the local to the international. I had not actually published many reviews when I wrote the NYT. I did not have an enormous amount of reviewing experience, you know. And most of my reviewing for them has not been related to my subject matter.

It sounds like you establish a relationship with an editor by pitching them, but once that relationship is established, do you keep pitching, or do they mostly come to you with assignments?

Now, most of the time, they ask me.

But sometimes I'll have a book I want to suggest, and then I'll look for someplace that might be interested in covering it. I'll think: is the book already out, and if so which places run pieces about books that are already out? I also think about length—which journals work at which length. Because some books I don't want to write 3000 words on, I want to write 700 words on it at most. And then I'll think about which publications want me to write on my academic specialty, versus which ones offer more freedom.

How do you figure out which editors to pitch? I always found it so difficult to figure out which editors actually commission which type of pieces.

Each one has their own system. If I have a relationship with the publication, I usually just ask my typical editor if they're the right person to pitch for this, or if they would let me know who is. And that's easy. And some papers, like the LRB, have one email address. You don't pitch to individual editors. That's it, you pitch that one email address.

If I don't have a relationship, I look at the masthead, I try to figure out the emails for each editor. I might also ask other writers. Now you can ask AI what the pattern for the emails of a given publication is. I might ask Facebook writer's groups. Sometimes, when I see someone I know well publish a piece in a place I'd like to publish someday, I ask for the editorial contact in case I can use it someday. But I don’t ask strangers for this kind of info!

So if I can figure it out from the masthead I do that. And usually I include some line about how if you're not the right person then forward it to the appropriate person. And sometimes I just go straight to the top. Whoever's in charge of the book review section, or the editor-in-chief of the whole thing. And the other option is if you're on Bluesky or Twitter, it's not unusual to write someone a DM and say, hey I'd really love to pitch you something. I'd really love to contact you if you're accepting pitches, what’s your best email address for this? And that can work too.

How do you go about writing a review?

I read the book pencil in hand. If it's a food memoir, I read it in the bathtub and reflect on how good my life is. If it's a slog, I question my life choices. Usually I read it once, for the really big essays I might read it two or three times. Then for the next step I type up all the quotes and remarks I made in the margins. And as I'm typing up quotes, I make a few comments on them. I try to think about why I marked off that section and what it’s connecting to for me, or what I thought of it. So it's a kind of process writing, where I start working out what my eventual points might be. I tend to use Scrivener for this. Then I start thinking of the structure. If it's a short piece you can't do much with the structure. If it's a longer piece, I might print out the notes, read them, and try to notice what patterns are emerging. Based on this I can outline the sections and start to figure out what order they should be in.

If I'm writing for the LRB, I know that I might start with my own material or some argument or story of my own. Because with them they have this essay style where you don't just write about the book, but incorporate it into a longer meditation.

If it's a shorter piece I just start writing, if it's a longer piece then I write out the structure. I might make more notes on it at this point, flesh it out even more. As I’m doing this, I’m starting to come up with little phrases I can use in the eventual review, so I’m writing without really feeling like I’m writing.

Then I make another sub-file with a title like an attempt at a draft, and I put on a pomodoro or sit down with some friends on zoom, and then I try to start writing it. And I usually go through the structure as is. For the first half I'm afraid I won't have enough words, and then there's a magical part where I realize that I might not be able to get everything in.

How has this field changed in the time you've been writing?

I think everyone's under financial pressure and trying to figure out how to deal with the economics of publishing. The thing I've observed is that they are often moving into other connected media. The TLS has a podcast. I've co-hosted three podcasts with Mary Wellesley for the LRB, which has a subscription model that’s almost like an online course. They often link to related articles on the podcast pages so people can read more deeply into the topic. The LRB will sometimes also have audio versions of their articles.

NYRB has courses now, and podcasts. Some of their writers teach mini-seminars on their areas of expertise. The NYT has these interesting interactive poetry things online. They're playing with online forms and digital media. That is the big move. They're all diversifying in some way, offering an extra learning opportunity or conversation.

What I find very interesting is that the humanities are under such attack, both financially and politically. Enrollments for humanities courses are plummeting everywhere. This is an international thing. At the same time the humanities are really struggling and thinking how to survive, you have this boom in courses and podcasts with a book courses for the general public. Clearly people are interested in the humanities, but it's not the same interest as our students, or they're interested in different ways. And you'd think this would have to do with tuition, because it’s so expensive to study literature in the US, but in Germany there's no tuition at all, so I don’t think it’s just about tuition cost (note—Irina is a professor at the University of Bonn). There's just a move to degrees that seem practical, like they will lead to jobs, but at the same time there's a widespread hunger for literature, for great books, and some of these courses are thinking about how to serve that curiosity.

How does your Substack fit in?

I wasn't sure whether to start a Substack. I didn't know if that would be one more distraction in my life, so when I did so I promised myself that I wouldn't monetize it. I sat in on a course that Substack offered writers on how to professionalize their newsletters. I realized: if I monetize it then that becomes a job to me.

I decided Substack would be a place where I could share things with people and write essays that I didn't have any place for, or I didn’t want to go to the trouble of pitching to an editor. I just wanted to get some things off my mind, so this became my space to do that. Ideas really nag at me if they don’t have a place to go, and for some reason I apparently need to share those ideas with other people to be at peace.

Turns out the things I want to get off my mind have to do with some aspect of creativity, productivity, or technology. I am very purposefully not writing on Substack all the time, because I want to save most of my energy for my book, my scholarship, my essays. But I am thinking of things that I might do a little more of. Maybe interviews. Or some insight into the book in progress.

Has your public-facing writing affected your academic career at all?

I did a lot of reviews when I had so much work that I couldn't do really serious scholarship anyway, because I had so much administration and we were in a pandemic lockdown. I wrote little pieces, 900 or 400 word reviews. I did a lot of 400 word reviews. If I hadn't written those, I probably wouldn't have written a book anyway in that time, I was too overwhelmed with managing various crises.

But at some point, if you want to focus on bigger projects, you do have to decide what you're going to spend your writing time on. If my main goal were to be the most published scholar, as a scholar, writing book reviews wouldn't be the way to do it. And while the reviews have helped me practice skills useful for writing a trade book, I am also being much choosier about what I do now.

I do turn assignments down. Increasingly I'm trying to think—because I'm focusing on book projects, I'm trying to think with smaller assignments can they help me do some kind of thinking or research for a larger piece of work. Will they fit into my larger projects in some way. Or are they just so damn fun. Are they just so delightful that it would be a treat to do the reading and writing?

Or when I can, I try to check the prose of the writer, and if it's really bad I'll say no, because I don't want to write a bad review if I can. If I get the book and it's bad, then I'll write a negative review, but I don't knowingly go into an assignment where I will write a bad review.

What do you wish people knew about reviewing books?

What people tend not to know about it is that there is a lot of editing. Certainly academics don't know this, and sometimes have trouble with it. Editors for papers and magazines tend to be very hands-on, even in comparison to literary journals, where you tend to write the essay first, and if they accept it they usually only make a few small changes.

Writing for places like TLS or NYRB is quite collaborative, and that's a shift that I had to make at some point. Yes, my name goes on it, but it's often very collaborative. The editors will come up with ideas. Sometimes they’ll suggest phrasing. The editors have a large function in shaping the pieces one way or another, and it doesn't do to be too egotistical about it, because things will be cut or changed. It's not your precious object, you're performing a service. It's about the magazine's vision.

In the beginning I tended to fight against my editors' edits a lot more than I do now. At some point I just accepted that they're in that position, unless their edits make me say something factually wrong or elide an important change, I usually go with them. For instance, in one piece I'd talked about rape, and my editor changed it to a word that was less specific, and I thought it was important not to gloss over what I was talking about. I explained that, and they changed it back.

In general, they are the editor. And it doesn’t do to go nitpick every edit they make.

Book review writing is more collaborative than scholarly publishing, it’s more collaborative than literary journal publishing. Once you accept it, it can be a real joy, because you can remind yourself as you write that you're not in this alone, the draft doesn't have to be perfect. The editor is an editor—the editor can fix a line too. Maybe they see something I don't, or have an idea for what it should end on that solves the problem for me. And so...sometimes they change it and sometimes they don't. I find it make it so much easier to get a draft down when I realize I’m not alone with the work. And that my editors don't expect perfection – even if I sometimes do!

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Links and Notes

• Irina is here on Substack! Check out her newsletter!

• And if you want a look at a piece of hers that I thought was particularly good, you could do worse than this article in The London Review of Books that’s about several books which riff on everyone’s favorite chapter from Chaucer: The Wife of Bath’s Tale:

  Scholars have long puzzled over the inconsistencies in Alysoun’s speech. She defends marriage, but depicts married life as a purgatory. She argues against misogynistic stereotypes, but presents herself as a lusty shrew eager to bury each of her husbands. Chaucer says she’s a talented weaver, but most of her business comes from controlling access to her genitals. The medievalist D.W. Robertson Jr argued in the 1960s that Alysoun is ‘not a “character” in the modern sense at all, but an elaborate iconographic figure’ – an assemblage of clichés about women. Then came the twist: ‘that she still seems feminine to us is a tribute to the justness of the ideas which produced her.’ In other words, Alysoun seems realistic to modern readers because the old stereotypes are accurate.

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P.S. Due to a book deadline, so I’ll be on hiatus until Tuesday, July 8th.

1. There is an art to writing a pitch email. I cannot pretend to be particularly good at it. If you want to look at successful pitches, I recommend this website that Irina recommended: successfulpitches.com. I found that their spreadsheet didn’t work for me when I viewed it via their site, so here’s a direct link to it as well.

2. If you’re writing about books, you’ll likely be pitching a literary periodical (NYRB, TLS, LRB, LARB, The Cleveland Review of Books, etc); a general-interest magazine (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s); a newspaper with a strong books sections (The New York Times or The Guardian); a literary journal (Agni, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review) or a little magazine (The Point, The Drift, N+1).

When I was starting out, I was always confused quite a bit by the distinction between these various categories, in particular the distinction between the literary periodical, the literary journal, and the little magazine.

The literary periodical consists largely of biweekly outlets like the NYRB, TLS, LRB, and others—these journals typically don’t publish fiction or creative pieces, and they operate, editorially, more like a magazine than like a monthly or quarterly journal (i.e. The Kenyon Review or Missouri Review). In the former (the literary periodicals) you pitch editors and work with them to develop pieces; in the latter (the literary journals) you submit completed pieces and editors accept or reject them more or less as they are. There’s some editing, but not much.

But, complicating matters, there are a lot of ‘little magazines’ that are somewhere in between a literary journal and a literary periodical. I’m talking about journals like N+1,

The Drift

,

The Point

, or

The Metropolitan Review

. These journals often publish both critical and creative pieces, and each magazine has their own distinct editorial character, so it’s hard to generalize.