During a book-reviewing panel at AWP Baltimore this past March, my fellow panelists—Robin Becker, Eric Lorberer, Kathleen Rooney, and Elise McHugh—and I were met by an enthusiastic crowd on Thursday morning. I had moderated and participated in panels about book reviewing and literary community in previous years, with some mild interest. That morning, I spoke about reciprocity, and somewhere in the discussion that followed, I must have spoken about the dead. There was palpable, surging energy in the room. Months after the panel, I continued to receive emails: a chorus of thank-yous.
The living people I spoke with and corresponded with regarding that panel were enthusiastic. These writers were excited about the possibilities of the review. Yet what role could the dead play? Quite a significant one. Although my decade of experience as a reviewer and reviews editor has been predominantly with the living, I have been keenly aware of how the ways we think and write about literature—critically, generously, with curiosity—have changed.
In opposition to the steady decline in reviews and review outlets is the proliferation of the interview. Both interviewer and interviewee are living flesh and bone; their exchange has the potential to be dynamic, shifting, and unexpected. Reviews can often feel like the antithesis of dialogue: a one-sided conversation. But anyone who has studied literary scholarship or read voraciously would probably disagree with this sentiment.
When I teach undergraduate literary theory and criticism, our central literary text is the Norton Critical Edition of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, edited by Carla Kaplan. We begin with a section titled “Backgrounds and Contexts,” specifically the many reviews published upon the book’s release. These reviews reveal the range of interpretations of the novel, particularly those divided along racial lines. They also demonstrate the impact such reviews and reviewers may have had on Larsen’s career, offering students a chance to enter conversations about the Harlem Renaissance before they read the primary text.
Contemporary literature acts as a bridge to the past. The dead whisper down the lane, and we whisper back as contexts shift, as history unfolds, and as we come to understand a work of literature differently. While literary scholarship can help us discern and deepen this conversation, living readers and writers bear the responsibility of being well-read. Reading teaches us the value of listening to these exhilarating conversations, and reviewing teaches us how to participate fully in them.
If you would like to engage with the dead, there are several avenues. An omnibus or essay review, in which several titles are considered together, might include a historical book; alternatively, older texts might provide the backbone for a reviewer’s attention to contemporary works. It is important to understand a text on its own terms when reviewing—I am constantly asking, What is this writer attempting to do?—and I do not believe I have ever read a text that was not reaching out to another one, however explicitly or subtly. It is a reviewer’s task to think through those connections and their implications.
Because so much book reviewing is yoked to the publishing industry’s drive for publicity, it can feel difficult, even impossible, to advocate for a review of a title that is not current—that is, one that has not been published within the past year. But the past is a cornerstone for writers and their conversations. Browse the recommended-reading lists from featured poets on the Of Poetry Podcast or in most writers’ Substacks. We are engaging as much with the dead as with the living, if not more so.
Such resurrections do not necessarily mean retreading the same list of authors. Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series offers one excellent example: editors and contributors are offered a chance to flesh out the careers and work of lesser-known writers. Direct public literary commentary may not be in my personal wheelhouse, but readers can offer their own perspectives—after doing the research, I implore you—on social-media platforms or their blogging counterparts, such as Substack. Maya C. Popa’s Substack, for example, offers a rich intertextual and historical engagement with literature, bridging the past and the work of contemporary writers.
When you read widely, you will begin to discover these historical conversations intuitively. When you pay attention to publishing’s past, you will have the opportunity to trace the thread of literary discovery and inheritance. And when you write a review, you draw that thread through the past.
Through this, we remember.
