The reason editors don’t want reviews of classic novels

Several friends have [asked]: “Why do the editors of critical journals not seem excited when I pitch them articles on small press reprints of classic novels?”

John Guillory says the canon consists of every book that’s taught in college. I guess that’s somewhat accurate. To be a classic in America, you need some academic attention.

It’s not totally true, because there are sci-fi classics that are widely-read and still in print, but I don’t think are taught in school too often—books like Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation (which was already sixty years old when I was reading it as a kid in the 1990s). I would say that a classic is any book that’s still able to inspire fresh readers even after thirty or forty years after publication.

Nowadays there is a cottage industry of ‘rediscovered’ or ‘forgotten’ classics. Lots of imprints specialize in this—the NYRB Classics is the most famous, but most small presses will sometimes republish older books in the hope of inspiring a hit. I believe Melville House is basically kept afloat by their reprint of Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone. And something similar is true for Persephone Books and Miss Pettigew Lives For A Day.

The literati often apply a wholly-unmerited level of cynicism to the rediscovered classics business. In a widely-shared article in Tablet, Blake Smith wrote:

Those of us who are not in the room, or the groupchat, where decisions about what reputations are to be revived or made can meet the injunctions of the NYRB press with earnest good faith in their latest dispensations (“now is the time to read Magda Szabó—take Agota Kristof away!”); with cautious, sifting, suspicion; or with outright rejection, on the grounds that what the editors declare a “classic” is almost certainly a subcanonical instance of Europe’s endlessly dying modernism or its American imitations.

This is true—there is a definite aesthetic to the NYRB Classics. They’re often slim, modernist novels—examples are endless, from Renata Adler’s Speedboat to Linda Rosenkrantz’s Talk to Dezso Kosztolányi’s Skylark. But…so what? Just because we can label a thing, is it not good?