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Check out the Boston Book Review's website.
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Courtesy of Widener Photographic Services
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The odds are terrifying: 99 percent of magazine startups fail within their
first year, and then it gets worse-of the remaining 1 percent, 96 percent
fail in their second year. But the Boston Book Review has navigated those
narrow straits and emerged unscathed-nay, robust. Now starting its fourth
year of publication, BBR boasts a paid circulation of 10,000, and 6,000
additional readers each week visit its online version, making it the third-largest
book review in the United States, after the New York Times Book Review and
the New York Review of Books. The lively, 44-page publication began improbably
enough through friendships formed by a few intellectually restless students
in a Harvard Summer School literature course in 1992.
BBR's editor, Theoharis C. Theoharis, taught the course, on the twentieth-century
British novel. His students included current BBR president Kiril Stefan
Alexandrov, editorial assistant Larry Hardesty, and publisher Greg Carr,
M.P.P. '86, who also chairs Prodigy, the Internet service provider. Together
with founding publisher Lucinda Jewell, M.Ed. '90, they raised $15,000 to
launch BBR in 1993 as a quarterly. "There was a need for a book review
with a fresh outlook, one that was willing to take chances," says Alexandrov.
"The Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books have the same
people writing for them over and over again. You know what they are going
to say about any issue before you read the piece. We thought, why isn't
there a book review with a lot of new voices? Boston, especially the Harvard
area, had so much talent that wasn't getting any play. These people needed
a venue."
BBR offers things no other book review has: interviews, an audio-books
column, a regular column on children's books, a science column, a special
poetry column-and a website. While they do treat "big" books,
their "Hot Type" column covers obscure and specialty publishers.
"We have a consistent commitment to smaller and alternative presses,"
says Jewell. There are literary crossword puzzles and quote games, a column
on foreign books in translation, a column on CD-ROMs. There's also whimsy,
like a review of a book on the history of plastic that Theoharis beamingly
recalls as "wonderful." This fall, BBR began publishing original
poetry and fiction. "We always saw ourselves as being a literary/arts
magazine," says Alexandrov. "We're not just a book review."
The first issue-mostly assembled in the apartments of Jewell and Alexandrov-sold
500 copies. Today, there are 10 issues a year, sold by subscription, on
newsstands, and in about 900 bookstores throughout the United States and
Canada. A slight majority (55 percent) of the readers are female. Notably,
BBR discusses more books by women than any other review, Alexandrov says.
"Women in the publishing world are still more heavily represented at
the drudge level than at the writer level, and we wanted to change that,"
says Theoharis. "It's important for us to have women writing on science,
history, religion-not only poetry and psychology."
Many Harvard faculty members write for BBR. Loker professor of English
Robert Kiely has ranged from biographies of E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence
to The Unconsoled, a recent novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Peter Gomes, minister
in Memorial Church and Plummer professor of Christian morals, caused a flap
with an irreverent reading of a biography of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder
of Christian Science; he also went against the grain by praising Queen Elizabeth
II in a strongly argued piece on a recent biography. Kenan professor of
government Harvey Mansfield and professor of psychiatry and medical humanities
Robert Coles have wrangled with political and social topics. Dean of continuing
education Michael Shinagel reviewed a biography of painter Edward Hopper
under the headline, "A Steady, Shining Desolation."
Two years ago, BBR began giving annual literary awards for the best poetry,
fiction, and nonfiction books of the prior year. Winners have included both
famous writers (novelist Joyce Carol Oates for Zombie) and emerging stars
(poet Mark Doty for Atlantis). Plans are afoot for a literary film series
and a dialogue series between artists and writers. The group that coalesced
in a six-week summer course now aspires, in Theoharis's words, to see their
publication "have the same function in American culture that the TLS
[Times Literary Supplement] has in England."
~ Craig Lambert
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