Judgment Days

A special essay edition. Giveaways resume next week.

This is a special essay edition of News & Reviews I’ve been working on for a little while.

Before we dive into it, of course I want to take a moment and acknowledge the massive loss of lives and homes both in Australia with the floods and abroad in the war. I hope your families and loved ones are okay. Maria Tumarkin, a Ukrainian–Jewish–Australian writer, born and raised in Kharkiv, is running a donation program where you can receive one of her two books, both of which speak of Ukraine in different ways. If you already have her books, or don’t need a reward for your generosity, the Ukraine Crisis Appeal is here.

Illustration by YoungEarlyGrey

This week’s essay

Originally I planned to write an essay specifically about Goodreads being terrible, but it grew into something else—something bigger about judgment and the nature of creating art privately which is then critiqued publicly. It grew this way because of things Ella Baxter and Jennifer Down have recently written about their books coming out. It grew this way because I just taught for the first time and people wanted to know how I managed criticism. It also grew this way because I have a column for the ‘Artistry’ issue of T Magazine due soon, and so have been chewing over a lot of these questions more than I’d normally allow myself to. (As Vonnegut says, ‘I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.’)

The main two problems I have with Goodreads are: 1) an individual’s multi-hour experience of any work of art shouldn’t be rated out of five, and 2) that rating should not be used by a massive corporation to effect sales and marketing. This review by Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker discussing Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon by Mark McGurl articulates some of my concerns about Amazon owning Goodreads, for anyone interested. ‘Judgment Days’ is a chewier, more questioning, worrying piece, about the chasm between writing and publishing.

The full essay is only available to paying subscribers, but I have started a ‘7-day free trial’ feature. If you’re on the fence, please know the YanagiharaRama special edition (mentioned last week) will run across two weeks in late March and I think it’s going to be fun and awesome.