For as long as I can remember, I have been a fan of magazines on a variety of topics. I currently subscribe to various magazines on travel, cooking, country living and design. I was a charter subscriber to HGTV Magazine, Food Network Magazine and the Pioneer Woman magazine. Over the years, I have lamented the demise of many of the magazines I used to look forward to receiving in my mailbox every month: Urban Living, Country, Country Extra, American Journalism Review, Columbia Journalism Review and, most recently Civil War Times.
As a child, my appetite for glossy pictures, clever cartoons, punning prose - for all the intelligence I could not find in my hometown or on television - had to be suppressed, lest I fail out of school. Even now, the arrival of the latest issue of most of my magazines feels like an event: a new vision of the world as seen by many minds, wedged between two covers.
But the American magazine is in a state of decay. Now known mostly as brands, once sumptuous print publications exist primarily as websites or YouTube channels, hosts for generic scribblings, the ever ubiquitous “take.” Meanwhile, a thousand Substacks bloom, some of them very good, with writers in the emancipated state of being paid directly by their readers. Yet even in this atomized, editorless landscape, perverse incentives apply. Are you thirsty for another post about cancel culture or wokeness? Me neither. Yet culture war still largely rules the day.
One haven from culture war and dwindling standards of intellectual discourse in recent years has been Bookforum, a scrappy quarterly with an outsize impact in the world of letters. When the news dropped in December 2022 that the magazine had been shuttered, it struck many of us who enjoyed updates on new book releases, or reviews of much-loved books as if the house we had grown up in had burned down.
Launched in 1994 as a modest literary supplement to Artforum, the premier magazine of the American art world, Bookforum took on a life of its own. But when publisher and shareholder Anthony Korner sold Artforum to Penske Media Corporation, Bookforum was not part of the deal. Although it remains possible that an interested buyer could swoop in to revive it, for now, the house is in ashes, the magazine’s staffers out of their jobs.
What made Bookforum so special? Its editors were wise talent spotters who gave many young writers their first shot at ambitious long-form criticism. Bookforum took in the whole world: not only literature but also art, cinema, music, philosophy, politics, technology, history, food, sports and fashion. Part of its edge was that its parent publication belonged to the art world; another was the cohort of editors and contributors it inherited from the old Village Voice, especially its VLS literary supplement, long a proving ground of journalistic talent. Bookforum was an international magazine with a downtown sensibility. It trafficked in ideas and contributors from the academy, but you would never call it academic. It even had a column dedicated to bestsellers; a category studiously ignored by most book critics.
Bookforum was one of those publications that made reading about reading and writing at once a light and a deep sort of pleasure. There is the zing of Max Read describing a novel by disgraced memoirist James Frey as an author writing "fanfic about himself”; the boldness of Lake Micah on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Water Dancer”: “We recognize the petrified flexors of a historical muscle”; the righteousness of Sarah Nicole Prickett on Elizabeth Hardwick’s style: “Hardwick could do more in six words than any Hemingway type, including Hemingway.”
Critics are of course obliged to be fair, but there is no duty to be polite. Bookforum resisted some of the more baleful literary trends of the past decade. The first of these is the frenzied literary consumerism that eschews reviews in favor of book recommendations, author Q&As, puff-piece profiles and other forms of higher publicity. It requires little intellectual engagement - you do not have to read any books to make a list of them - and costs less than hiring critics. It imagines readers as mere shoppers.
Of course, literary culture, especially criticism, is always said to be in a state of crisis. In her seminal 1959 essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” Hardwick wrote of the Sunday book-review sections of the New York Times and the Herald Tribune: “The value and importance of individual books are dizzily inflated, in keeping with the American mood at the moment, but the book-review sections as a cultural enterprise are, like a pocket of unemployment, in a state of baneful depression insofar as liveliness and interest are concerned.” Hardwick’s lament is perpetually renewed, but increasingly the trouble with book reviews is not that they are boring or bad but that they disappeared, especially from newspapers. The news that The Washington Post revived its Book World is heartening; what is sad is that it was so surprising. The New York Times Review of Books is still alive and well, though.
American newspapers have long been capitalist enterprises, with potential for enormous profits (for most of their history, at least). The same can be said of our magazines, although it has never been true of literary and intellectual publications, the so-called little magazines, a genre that came of age in the early 20th century and swiftly became a hothouse for radical thought. For the most part, these institutions have been dependent on wealthy individual backers and hence subject to their whims and/or the limits of their life spans.
Other models do exist: n+1 is a magazine launched early in this century, run by an editorial collective and funded by a variety of donors. Two more recent standouts are the Drift and Forever, the first both literary and political, the second entirely literary, both devoted to discovering new writers. Some magazines take refuge in academic settings, but even these arrangements are precarious, as the recent example of the Believer demonstrates; it was abandoned by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and rescued by its original parent, McSweeney’s, with the help of crowdfunding. A similar appeal to readers recently saved the Texas Observer. The short-lived Astra, a lit mag funded by Chinese conglomerate Thinkingdom Media Group, was not so lucky, closing after just two issues.
America has no state model for the propagation of little magazines, unless you count the CIA’s clandestine funding of various journals during the Cold War. That episode is remembered as one of shame, but on the scorecard of the agency’s sins, surely the least of them is that it helped the Paris Review get off the ground, to say nothing of the powerful avant-garde magazines it bankrolled in Asia and Africa, including Black Orpheus, Hiwar and Transition.
Closer to home, Americans have always been subjected to the tyranny of publicity. Lately it has felt as though we are living through an age of publicity about publicity. The week after Bookforum’s demise was announced, a fawning profile in the New York Times appeared with the headline “Jenna Bush Hager, Progeny of Presidents, Is Now a Publishing Kingmaker.” Of course, the overlap between the audiences of Bookforum and the “Today” show, where Hager is a cohost and “TV book club” convener, are probably close to nil. Yet the proximity of these media events set my mind on a dystopian path.
I started imagining a future where all the cultural, political and intellectual publications had disappeared, and what remained of cultural discourse was dominated by the progeny of celebrities. It was a world full of stories about hope, friendship and companionship in a time when we need it so much, of stories about all the complications we experience in life from heartbreak to tough choices, of books that are chilling and mysterious but also poignant and even funny.
It was a vacuous world, where the purpose of literature was to warm the heart.
The likes of Hager’s book club are easily ignored when the institutions of a literary culture are sturdy. But when they start to wobble, one begins to imagine a future in which the only alternatives are Jenna, Oprah or some nightmarish AI hybrid of both. We live in an era of cultural disintegration, beset by cultural artifacts that are bite-size, superficial, even artificial. What we need more than ever are the intelligence, verve and criticality of a well-edited little magazine.
Bookforum is dead. Long live Bookforum!
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