Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?

Dwight Garner. NYT, 04/27/2026: shared link: Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?: What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature.

I hope the NYT sharing feature -- limited w/my subscription -- works on LT; good luck!

Thinking about current professional reviewers I look out for, besides Garner: Jennifer Szalai (NYT), Ed Simon (PRoB, LitHub). Probably will update as I encounter other reviews that job my memory.

Reviewers on Tic Toc carry more collective weight now than anything newspapers can muster among even the best educated and perceptive reviewers available, so it's merely which way the wind is blowing. The times they are a-changing and it's not all AI's fault. Let's blame social media, too.

The related question, and also related another topic I started here in Book Talk, is: would you read a book review written by an AI? Knowing that it can only compile and regurgitate what it finds actual people are already saying? I'd rather trust the opinions of all you folks here on LT.

>2 Cecrow: There are still resources between "hard copy" newspapers/magazines & TIC TOC I hope. My apartment has been too small to house physical newspapers or magazines for years (sorry, New Yorker). Most of my sources for reviews are via online sites where editing ranges from responsible to, uh, sometimes casual. Probably the best ones require subscriptions (which would have been the case for print newspapers & magazines). At the same time, I can't help but notice that reputable sources like NYT seem to rely too much on lists rather than full scale reviews -- not unlike The New Yorker, & it's shocking that Washington Post has not simply eliminated its Book World but any books coverage whatsoever. I also note that the Public Books site seems to focus more on movies/TV rather than book reviews recently. My standard is still TLS, though the semi-weekly coverage is a pain to take in. The limit to what I pay for is arbitrary, of course, as would have been the case for print; I gaze over the fence wistfully at London Review, Literary Review, The Nation, TNR, Slate, WSJ; these & others are still crankin em out, though there are still sites that are not yet paywalled, e.g. Guardian (though video games seem to get as much coverage as books), LARB (another "books" site that like NYRB seems to be doing more & more media articles).

Getting rid of (or reducing) book reviews in the papers and magazines is all part of the rest of the emptying of newsrooms and it sucks.