This is a beautifully long-winded way of confirming that "Literature" is simply a genre that people confuse for quality.
The people who write books that get featured in NYRB and the New Yorker, that come up through Iowa, etc, are the people that know that genre well. So of course they're welcome critics of it.
If you like the stuff that NYRB features, then you'll eat up reviews by those same authors. It would be silly for NYRB not to invite those reviews. Every other genre publication does the same thing.
It's only a problem if you let yourself buy into the idea that this style of work is more than an upper middle class fashion.
Pulications like NYRB and the New Yorker review books in many genres. Arguably, what defines 'literature' is quality (which I'll leave undefined), regardless of the genre. From that perspective, saying there is no difference between literature and non-literature is like saying there is no difference between NBA basketball players and those who couldn't make the NBA, or maybe more accurately, that there is no difference between typical developers at Google and those in the IT department of a mid-sized law firm (to pick an organization outside the tech field).
My experience is that there is, generally speaking, a clear qualitative difference between literature and non-literature.
It's an old trope to deny 'fine' arts have merit, but often such denials lack an assertion or evidence - they just deny someone else's. What do you think the state of such things is? All is equal? Everything is subjective? That would be pretty extreme.
Taken literally, this is a bit silly. I've read (and written) unpublished chapters that were absolutely terrible. There's clearly some kind of quality control going on.
It's just that the top 1% of literary output is a huge volume of work and most of it is pretty good. The fashion is which of the top books make it in front of you, but you're not seeing the invisible 90% of books that would never get there, or the 9% that need a lot of luck and an editor with a hatchet.
Hah. Yes, of course I wasn’t saying that quality isn’t applicable to the books they choose, but the quality is measured by genre expectations (and artful deviations therefrom) just like for all genres.
Inside the community of contemporary authors, editors, and MFA programs, there’e no real controversy to the idea that the writing suitable for NYRB, The New Yorker, etc is just a genre with specific, evolving expectations.
There are countless amazing works that those same authors and editors hold in extremely high regard, but that would not suit those publications on account of being too “something else”.
Really, it’s mostly the lay public that still carries a special sense of deference and esteem for this genre, thinking of that work as the inheritor of the Western Canon, itself being something that they were taught to see as the epitome of “Good Writing” rather than “Powerful Examples of a Certain Style”
The people who write books that get featured in NYRB and the New Yorker, that come up through Iowa, etc, are the people that know that genre well. So of course they're welcome critics of it.
If you like the stuff that NYRB features, then you'll eat up reviews by those same authors. It would be silly for NYRB not to invite those reviews. Every other genre publication does the same thing.
It's only a problem if you let yourself buy into the idea that this style of work is more than an upper middle class fashion.