New site alert

A place to go for reviews and discussion of books new and old. (Second Pass)

Dear Readers,

Over the past couple of years, as newspapers throughout the country have cut back on books coverage, there’s been a great deal of hand-wringing in the critical community about the future of reviews. I have attended more than one panel dedicated to the subject, and despite some distinguished, eloquent participants, these get-togethers are ultimately ineffectual affairs. The extinction of book pages are just another sign of the extinction of newspapers themselves, which are likely to keep folding at a healthy pace in years to come. This is not something I celebrate. But even a relative Luddite such as myself (no BlackBerry, no Kindle, no Twittering) gets most of his shorter-form journalism online. I read the New York Times almost exclusively on a screen.