Jessa Crispin: ‘We’re not allowed to say the Paris Review is boring’

The editor of Bookslut, which shut down last week, talks to the Guardian about the current state of American literature and its attendant frustrations

A couple of weeks ago, Jessa Crispin shut her longstanding book review site, Bookslut, down. Fourteen years after shed founded it, she told me at a Brooklyn coffee shop last week, she was feeling like she could not keep up the administrative duties required. She was personally exhausted, too.

Theres only so long that you can be the crank, before thats just who you are, Crispin said. Where youre wearing eight hats at the same time and three coats, drinking malt and yelling through the window of the Greenlight Bookstore [in Fort Greene, Brooklyn], Youre all a bunch of frauds!

Crispin laughed as she said that, self-aware about her reputation. All that week, shed been getting online aftershocks because shed been interviewed by New York Magazines Vulture website. I just dont find American literature interesting, went one quote. I find MFA culture terrible was another. This ruffled some (American and/or MFA-holding) feathers.

Yet to longtime readers of Crispins site, these criticisms came as no surprise. Crispin has rarely minced words about the publishing industrys priorities. She told me that it was the professional version of literature that bothers her now, versus what literature actually is. She can reel off a list of writers she currently finds exciting Kathryn Davis, Daphne Gottlieb, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore with ease. These days she is more into nonfiction, though its not usually the popular sort of personal essay that currently has her hooked. Its academic stuff, big tomes about William James or other weird topics.

Big publishers have stopped doing intellectually ambitious nonfiction, she explained. And so those writers are now on academic presses.

When Crispin started Bookslut back in May 2002, the internet was still a wide-open space. If you were passionate about something, you simply set up shop as a blogger and went for it. For Crispin, then a Planned Parenthood employee in Texas far from the center of literary publishing in New York, that something was books. She and her friends simply organized themselves and started writing about their obsessions.

Early Bookslut pieces tended to be quite short, and often they were written in the direct vernacular style of writers still finding themselves. James Joyce is seen as being impenetrable, incomprehensible, and just plain obtuse, reads one early piece on How to Throw a Bloomsday party having fallen in love with Ulysses when forced to read it for a James Joyce class, I tend to disagree. But as Bookslut grew and flourished, the opinions and the subjects became more complex alongside the language. The result is a reading diary that tracks not only Crispins own reading and writing but that of a host of contributors she had on the site. In recent years youd more commonly find lesser-known writers like Sallie Tisdale or works in translation under review or interview there.

Booksluts sensibility extended nicely from its beginnings as an outsider. It can be a bit hard to remember now, but as little as 10 years ago, book reviewing was still a province largely restricted to daily newspapers. Amazon reviews had only recently come to the fore. The average reader was rarely heard from. And authors were just beginning to dip their toe into the water of those opinions. Blogs are like reports from a far-flung world, one writer told the New York Times back then, in a remark that already seems quaint.

But within a few years, book blogs became increasingly professional-looking. They were also increasingly well-regarded by writers and newspaper editors alike. Like Bookslut, though, they were still only very occasionally profitable for the people who ran then.

The influence of those blogs is hard to parse, because often they reflected the idiosyncrasies of their creators rather than industry priorities. Book blogs did not respond to the general priorities of American readers, either, who tend to read more potboilers than literary fiction. They were passion projects, done for the love and with little eye to marketing priorities. And while many book bloggers went on to become critics and novelists, it was usually not the case that they scored high-profile or lucrative book deals.

Crispin is an illustrative example. It is only in the last two years that the industry shed written about for so long seemed interested in giving her work. She has published two books in the last 18 months. One was an introduction to tarot, long an interest of Crispins, for Touchtone books, a Simon & Schuster imprint. The other was a more personal project, a memoir for the University of Chicago Press called The Dead Ladies Project. Right now, for the small literary press Melville House, she is writing a book on feminism. Though that may sound like success, none of these book deals have made her rich.

In fact Crispins long run at Bookslut, where she did basically what she wanted, gave her a vision into the world of publishing that made her ill. She would open Bookforum, for example, she said, and find it reviewing only a certain set of books. As things get kind of more chaotic for publications, she said. They get narrower and narrower and more elite and nepotistic. It bothered her that the industry thought of itself as being intellectually honest when it was obsessed with money and celebrity.

She began to think of Bookslut as a kind of alternative to the literary scene. If you could just pretend like the scene didnt exist, she said. Thats how I was combating it. Increasingly Bookslut became a home for writers on more obscure work, and eschewed the usual conversation-grabbers. To get away from it all Crispin moved, for awhile, to Berlin, which she said was a nice cushion from conventional book chatter.

Staying outside of that mainstream, Crispin said, had some professional costs. We didnt generate people that are now writing for the New Yorker, Crispin said. If we had, I would have thought that we were failures anyway. Shes bored by the New Yorker. In fact, of the current crop of literary magazines, she said only the London Review of Books currently interested her, especially articles by Jenny Diski or Terry Castle. Of the New Yorker itself, she said: Its like a dentist magazine.

Crispins general assessment of the current literary situation is fairly widely shared in, of all places, New York. It is simply rarely voiced online. Writers, in an age where an errant tweet can set off an avalanche of op-eds more widely read than the writers actual books, are cautious folk.

And Crispin cant stand the way some of these people have become boosters of the industry just at the moment of what she sees as its decline. I dont know why people are doing this, but people are identifying themselves with the system, Crispin said. So if you attack publishing, they feel that they are personally being attacked. Which is not the case.

Its not that she doesnt understand these writers reasoning. Everything is so precarious, and none of us can get the work and the attention or the time that we need, and so we all have to be in job-interview mode all of the time, just in case somebody wants to hire us, Crispin added. So were not allowed to say, The Paris Review is boring as fuck! Because what if the Paris Review is just about to call us? The freedom from such questions is something Crispin personally cherishes.

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