THE METHOD: Salon’s Rebecca Traister on verifying quotes and off-the-record comments

In 2012, The Slant interviewed the feminist writer on the art of fact-checking.

Rebecca Traister is a contributing writer at Salon and The New York Times Magazine, where she regularly writes brilliant and bold essays on the intersections between gender, politics, and media. She got her start in journalism as a fact-checker for The New York Observer. In 2010 she wrote Big Girls Don’t Cry (Free Press), a riveting read on how the wild 2008 presidential campaign expanded the range of possibilities for women in politics and society. She gives

The Slant a writer’s view of the fact-checking process:

Tell us about an egregious mistake a checker caught.

No! It’s so bad and embarrassing that I cannot even bear to admit what it was.

Ever use an off-the-record comment?

I always and under every circumstance honor an off-the-record request made prior to a specific statement or a whole interview. Of course, for some valuable piece of information or insight, I’ll beg and wheedle to get someone to put it on the record. But if the answer is no, it’s no. It gets slightly trickier when an interview subject retroactively takes something off. (i.e. if she or he says something and then says, “That was off the record.”) There are people who would argue that technically, you can ethically justify using it anyway, but it’s a tough question. You have to weigh each situation differently: consider your relationship with the source, how crucial the statement is to the story you’re telling, what your gut feeling about the intention of the interviewee is, and how media savvy they are (i.e., are they media novices, in which case you give them more leeway, in my view. The pros should know better.)

Should quotes be verified?

I have rarely had fact-checkers confirm quotes. I spent years as a fact-checker at The New York Observer, and we didn’t check quotes. At Elle, where they do, I’ve handed over tapes and transcripts, but it feels like a slight violation.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m always thrilled to be fact-checked; I consider it a great collaboration. But because of the way I was trained, I consider the interviews to be outside the purview of fact-checking. In fact, when I hired a researcher to check Big Girls Don’t Cry, he was very surprised–and maybe a bit horrified–that I didn’t want him to check my tapes against the quotes I used in the book.

Tell us what makes a great fact-checker.

Mostly engagement with the material. That doesn’t mean they have to find it scintillating, just that they care about the process of reporting, that they feel invested in making sure it’s correct. Fact-checkers are reporters, and reporters have to get interested in whatever they’re reporting, whether or not they find it personally diverting. So that engagement leads to an investment in whether or not the work delivers accurate information to readers. And that I think leads to the other great fact-checking qualities: thoroughness, attention to the tiniest detail, a keen sense of where to confirm information, and good instincts about whether certain sources pass the smell test.

What are you working on now?

I’m in the midst of writing a book about unmarried women scheduled for publication by Putnam in 2013.

Traister’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Elle, and Vogue, among others.

THE OTHER SLANT: The New York Observer’s New EIC, Aaron Gell, talks Peter Kaplan and Jared Kushner

In 2012, the Slant interviewed the seasoned journalist about his new post at the storied publication.

When the economy tanked in 2008, Aaron Gell lost his post as executive editor of Radar, then a print magazine. To soften the blow, he started ASSME (American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites), inviting fellow fireds to meet, drink and discuss the changing (and crumbling) state of their profession. Amid the sinking economy and mass job casualties, ASSME captured the zeitgeist, attracting a whopping amount of media attention (The New York Times, Advertising Age, New York, Gawker, etc.). But just as the group started gaining serious momentum, its leader landed a job as the new editor-in-chief of Hemispheres, United Airlines’s magazine.

Today, Gell is eons away from those drab days. While continuing to ratchet up an impressive portfolio of work at premier publications (The New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, Details, Elle), he’s also published Speak of the Devil, a riveting Kindle Single about his former colleague, Peter Braunstein, who, one eerie Halloween night in 2005, chillingly turned from journalist to sex criminal.

And this summer, he struck journalism gold when Jared Kushner, the owner of The New York Observer, tapped him to become the paper’s new editor-in-chief, a position Gell calls “the best job in media.”

In his first full-length interview since snagging the top spot, Gell points to the salmon paper’s strong Hurricane Sandy coverage to challenge critics who argue that the Observer lost its “inimitable voice” and editorial heft when legendary editor Peter Kaplan decamped for Conde Nast in 2009. (He also responds to Nathan Heller’s fascinating profile of Kaplan in the September 14 issue of The New Republic.) Herewith, his plans for improving the paper and increasing online traffic–plus, the skinny on what it’s like to work for Kushner.

It’s been two months since you were appointed EIC. We’re curious about the changes readers should expect from the print edition and Observer.com.

Some changes should already be evident. In a nutshell, we’re aiming to bring more voice and point of view to our stories: more ambition, more nuance, more energy and more risk.

One thing that’s becoming apparent is that with readers increasingly finding their news through social networks and sites like Reddit, Buzzfeed and Hacker News, original content has a much better shot at breaking through, because if you publish work that’s fresh and surprising, readers will literally distribute it for you, directly to the people who are most eager to consume it.

That’s a good situation for us because the Observer has never really been in the SEO or aggregation game. We made half-hearted attempts at it here and there, but weren’t any good at it, and we hated every minute. Now the value of that stuff is falling because people don’t tend to share a piece of reblogged content with their friends. We’re finding much more success by simply playing to our strengths. I’ve urged our writers to be less anxious about acknowledging every development on their beat and instead focus on the stories where they can really bring something to the table, whether that’s in terms of reporting, analysis, voice or storytelling.

There’s also a growing emphasis on opinion. I’ve brought on a number of freelance columnists who are just naturally provocative and interesting: Kevin Baker, Nina Burleigh, Ryan Holiday, Joshua David Stein, Eddie Huang, Duff McDonald–and I’m looking to add more. What they have in common is that they’re very strong, singular voices; they’re completely fearless and they have a truly unique way of looking at things. We’re finding that when someone is willing to put themselves out there with a fresh, intelligent take, readers really devour it. Actually, Steph, your breastfeeding piece was an excellent example of that.

We can already see the impact. October was our biggest month ever for traffic on Observer.com, and Betabeat has nearly doubled its numbers since I started.

Some journos we know claim to have stopped reading the paper after legendary editor Peter Kaplan left. They cite a perceived shift from long-form to shorter articles, a certain lack of editorial heft, and the absence of a kind of quirky sense of humor or voicey-ness as reasons they stopped reading. Can you explain how the paper changed after Kaplan’s departure in 2009?

The fact that you’re asking about the Kaplan era four editors downstream is a big testament to Peter’s influence. He’s an extraordinary editor, and he put out a great newspaper. There is no one better. Peter set the standard. That said, Tom McGeveran, Kyle Pope and Elizabeth Spiers did really excellent work as well, and I think we’re publishing a very fine paper now.

It’s also worth acknowledging that the changes at the Observer coincided with an explosion of scrappy online outlets working some of the same territory the paper had to itself for a long time, not to mention the most turbulent period in the media business anyone can remember. The whole industry has been challenged by that, and given that the paper was designed in large part, as a throwback to the broadsheets of the 1920s, there was a pretty big psychic shift that had to happen. I think my predecessors have done pretty well, considering.

What’s an example of a piece you’ve published since beginning work at the Observer that epitomizes the kind of story and sensibility you strive for in the paper as a whole?

I’m probably most proud of our current issue, which closed the day after Sandy hit. Only a few of us were able to make it into the office, but we had reporters all over town doing incredible work. Everyone rallied and worked around the clock to cover the storm. In addition to a number of hard news scoops and dispatches from some of the hardest hit areas, including Hunter Walker’s reporting on the dangers from the flooding of the Gowanus Canal and Jessica Roy in DUMBO, we published some really smart analysis, like Matt Chaban’s story on how the Mayor’s residential rezoning push in waterfront areas like Williamsburg worsened the disaster.

The paper ran a big headline across the front page, NEW YORK TO SANDY: ‘BLOW ME.’ Was there any hesitation about that?

It was the only thing we really considered. I felt like it channeled a certain sense of defiance that New Yorkers were feeling in that moment. I think that’s occasionally the role of a paper like the Observer—giving voice to a certain cathartic, gut-level response that would seem out of place in the Times or New York or another more established outlet. We’d slept in the office the night before, and we were pretty fried and maybe a bit shaken and worried about our friends and families, so that headline came straight from the heart.

In a recent New Republic feature on Peter Kaplan, journalist Nathan Heller writes: “It’s hard to find a major publication right now, in print or online, that’s not in some way flavored by the old Observer: Subtract Kaplan from the media landscape of the past 20 years and you lose The Awl, much of Gawker, and a good bit of Politico, too. You lose many of the most distinctive reporter-stylists at magazines like New York, favorite bylines in the Sunday Times, and even members of the writing staff of Girls.” Do you agree with that assessment?

That’s probably a good one for someone else to answer. Peter is a genius. He’s clearly one of the most influential editors of the last few decades. You probably also have to give some props to Graydon Carter, even though he was at the paper for just a year. Before editing the Observer, he’d created Spy with Kurt Andersen, and you can still detect some faint echoes of that in what we do now as well. We’re actually celebrating our 25th anniversary this year, and I’ve spent some time poring over the old issues. One thing that has leaped out at me is that the Observer’s institutional voice was never really as monolithic as it has seemed in retrospect. The paper published everyone from Hilton Kramer to Candace Bushnell—and it was the mix that made it really remarkable. Peter was the ringmaster of all that, and maybe more important, he created a culture in which amazingly talented young writers could find a home and make a real mark on the city. Fortunately that hasn’t changed. The talent in our newsroom is just incredible. I cannot imagine a better team.

In the same article, Heller writes that Kaplan held “the belief that writing from your particular experience of a subject was necessary not just for rich reporting and editorial honesty but because it opened up a space for bold intelligence.” Is that your sensibility too?

I guess I have my own sensibility at this point....Harold Bloom had it right about the “anxiety of influence” —creatively speaking, it’s not healthy to dwell too much on what came before. As for my own approach to this, beyond maintaining our long-standing focus on prominent, ambitious, colorful New Yorkers, it probably comes down to having fun. I think there’s a huge fun deficit in the media lately. Everyone’s afraid. We just lost Newsweek, and there have been recent layoffs at Conde Nast, the Times, the Daily, and the Voice, so it’s natural that people would play it safe. But when you’re doing it right, journalism is great fun. I think readers can sense that, and that spirit has always been what I most loved about the paper.

Many are curious about the high turnover rate of the editor-in-chief post: you’re the paper’s fourth editor since Jared Kushner purchased it in 2006. Can you tell us why that is? What it’s like to work with him?

Jared’s a great publisher. I am floored by the level of editorial freedom we have. That’s a very rare thing. I can’t speak to the past, but from my point of view, there’s a natural and perfectly healthy tension between the owner and the editor of any publication, and it doesn’t seem at all surprising that the kind of financial pressures that newspapers have found themselves in during the last few years would tend to draw out those tensions more than usual.

We’ve heard reports about Kushner’s focused commitment to the paper’s bottom line. Can you give us specific examples of how he’s building anew the various aspects of the business (the paper, the sites, etc)?

Under Arthur Carter, the Observer was never expected to be profitable. Jared has been incredibly smart about finding new revenue streams and creating a thriving business. He launched properties like The Commercial Observer, PolitickerNJ, Scene, and YUE, and that has taken a lot of the pressure off of the Observer itself. My focus is on improving the paper and increasing the readership for Observer.com, Betabeat, Politicker and GalleristNY, as well as figuring out how to create content—whether it’s video series, special sections or events—that advertisers are excited about and want to associate themselves with. We’ve got great momentum, and we just appointed an extremely impressive new president, Mike Albanese, from BuzzMedia, so it feels like we’re on the right track.

Are there plans to develop a national focus on Observer.com? And what do those plans look like?

I don’t think it’s a matter of a big transformation so much as increasingly lifting our gaze beyond the borders of Manhattan and seeing the New York part of our identity more as a sensibility than a geographical limitation. The internet has introduced us to readers all over the world, so it’s a logical evolution to broaden our outlook online, in the same way publications like New York, the Times, The New Yorker, and Gawker have been doing. But the paper itself remains extremely New York-centric, and I expect it always will.

With a significant disparity in paid circulation (51,000 paper readers) and online traffic (2.1 million monthly online visitors for all of the digital properties), can you explain the argument for continuing to publish the paper versus moving the entire operation online?

There are a few reasons. First, the paper fuels everything else we do. It’s central to the identity of the whole enterprise. The idea that we are at heart a newspaper carries tremendous psychological weight—it fuels a certain ambition and sense of purpose that is very difficult to recreate with a purely digital product. It makes us work harder. Second, advertisers love it, because although our readership is not enormous, it happens to be extremely influential and financially secure. That makes it an incredible value for luxury advertisers in that they can speak precisely to the clientele that they’re trying to reach. And third, putting out a newspaper like the Observer is just great fun, so as long as you can figure out how to make the revenue support it, why wouldn’t you?

How does the Observer compete with all the smart gossip-news sites it helped spawn?

There are so many outlets doing great work, but I do think there’s something very special about the Observer. We just try to do it better—to offer readers more insight and to be more thoughtful, more amusing, quicker, smarter and surprising.

Whatever happened to that group you started back in 2008, ASSME (American Society of Shitcanned Media Elites), after losing your job as Radar‘s executive editor? Are you still involved with them, or are you less active in the group now that you’ve rejoined the media elite!?

ASSME was never a real organization. When the industry started falling apart in 2008, I felt like everyone I knew in the business needed to let off some steam and take our minds off of the economic implosion we were living through. So ASSME was really just a party theme, but it hit a very raw nerve. Never underestimate what you can do with an open bar and a cute invite.

The idea to turn it into a group blog for underemployed writers came later, but around the time it really got rolling, I wound up getting a new job. Interestingly, two of the main contributors, Drew Grant and Steve Huff, are now at the Observer, so the spirit lives on. I just donated the last of our “Yes We Canned!” T-Shirts to Hurricane Sandy relief, so maybe we’ll see a few around town in the next few weeks.

THE OTHER SLANT: Novelist John Reed Paves the Way for Repentant Book Critics

In 2012, the Slant interviewed the author Snowball's Chance a piece he wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Last month, the novelist John Reed hosted “Revise & Recant,” a National Book Critics Circle event, where guilt- laden book reviewers took center stage to retract unfair or unnecessarily harsh critiques they’d written in the past. One by one, the repentant pundits carved out a space for themselves within that quintessentially American tradition of public atonement, ushering in a new genre of sorts–the literary apology. (Surprisingly, no major media outlets covered the gathering, except for The Wall Street Journal in an aptly titled story, “Regrets, Even Critics Have a Few.”)

Reed, the 43-year-old son of renowned New York City artists David Reed and Judy Rifka, grew up among tall ceilings and long windows in the spacious lofts of 1970s TriBeCa, then a shabby bohemia burning with creativity.

Those early years informed the liberalism and inventiveness in his four novels (A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance, The Whole, All the World’s A Grave) and short story collection (Tales of Woe)–as well as his expert rabble- rousing.

On September 25th, the provocateur invited The Slant to one of his old haunts in TriBeCa, Nha Trang, a Vietnamese eatery. Over oysters, he hammered home the First Commandment of literary criticism: Thou shall not review work thou hast not read. He also shared what inspired “Revise & Recant,” who showed up to confess cruel critiques and how criticism often misses the mark: In 2002, when my book, Snowball’s Chance [a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm that takes aim at capitalism and politics in a post-911 world] came out, the far right was trying to resurrect a Cold War mentality and direct it at terrorism. You had guys like Christopher Hitchens talking about Orwell and Animal Farm.His book, Why Orwell Matters, came out around the same time that my novel did. As the right was trying to create a new Cold War, parody was under attack because copyrights had been extended indefinitely for big corporation in the United States. For a moment, it looked like parody was going to become illegal. In the U.K., parody is not protected. So when the book came out, the U.K. people were very hostile to it.

Hitchens had made this sharp turn to the right in supporting the Iraq war and was critical of the book. I debated him on the BBC and a few other places. But he hadn’t read the book. He was always very straight about that, though. I wasn’t as creeped out about him as by Kathy Young, a journalist who wrote a review of the book in The Boston Globe that was reprinted in Reason Magazine, that weirdo right wing publication. Young hadn’t even read the book.

Did Hitchens also write a review of Snowball’s Chance?

No, we just talked on the BBC a few times. To talk about something you haven’t read is a little bit different than writing about something you haven’t read. It’s a little less sleezy, I think.

Was Young’s review harsh?

She said Snowball’s Chance was blaming the victims of terrorism and I could see her mounting that argument, even if she had read the book. But I don’t think it’s a cool argument to mount if you haven’t read the text. I mean, where’s the art of critique? You read the book and you say nice things about it, then you lay into it, and say, “but he’s really wrong about so-and-so.”

If you’re going to write about a book, you have to have read it. Step One. First she lays into it and then she says she’s not going to read it because it’s too disgusting. Not only do I blame her, I have to say that I blame the editors at The Boston Globe and Reason Magazine for printing it because that’s the kind of thing, as an editor, you should not run. It does say in the review she hadn’t read it. But still, if you’re going to belittle a book, you have to have read it.

Did you call her on it? Did she apologize?

Yeah, I contacted her and told her that I thought she was a jerk and she said she would read it and correct it. But she was full of shit. She wasn’t going to read it. But Hitchens apologized. He was talking about the book at an event at Cooper Union, which was a block from my house at the time. I was sitting in the audience when he started bad- mouthing me and my book. He said that I was named for John Reed the communist and that we were related.

So when the Q&A part of the event was going on, I talked to him a little bit from the stands. It was a thrilling moment. There was a reporter there, Rachel Donadio, who’s now at The New York Times. She was trying to foment an argument between me and Hitchens, but Hitchens was not going to do it. He was immediately apologetic: He said he shouldn’t have talked about a book he hadn’t read—and that he owed me a steak dinner and a bottle of scotch.

You had steak and scotch with Hitchens?

No, I didn’t get either. I think he did mean to give it to me. He was that kind of man, you know, very nice to you in person. But when you’re on the radio with him, your mic is going off.

In an article written by Susan Shapiro for The Wall Street Journal, “Regrets, Even Critics Have a Few,” you mentioned that you were critical of artist Gideon Bok’s work and that you regretted it. But Bok told the WSJ that he actually benefited from your criticism, that it made him think about his color palette. Have you ever read a critical review of your work that helped you?

By the time the book comes out, as an author, you’ve already heard all that criticism. I haven’t experienced a scathing review that I felt was just about the book. With Snowball’s Chance, it was really political. People who liked the book were radical in some way, and people who didn’t like it were right wing. Anyone trying to maintain the status quo didn’t like the book. As an editor, your job is to find a balance: If someone is being overly critical, you try and bring it back to the middle; if someone is being overly gushing, you have to question it. I think I was right about Gideon’s work, but I over-emphasized the point. I said it in a kind of snide, sarcastic way. I think I said he uses “a country- mouse color palette.”

And now you’re Facebook friends!

Yeah, we’re palsy. We’ve never been quite so palsy after that though I have to say. I mean we act like we’re still friends, but I’m not so sure.

So were you the one who spearheaded this event?

Yeah, with The National Book Critics Circle. I ended up doing events for them when I got elected for the board. I wanted to do punkier, more entertaining events. I thought it would be interesting to have critics recant because they all have something to apologize for; and furthermore, criticism at its very best is the conversation cocktail party. It’s not meant to be the final word on anything. It’s meant to be this kind of cocktail party banter: You have your drink, you start talking to somebody about something and it engages others ideally. I was pursuing that idea.

We didn’t see any coverage of the event and yet you had big name publications participating: The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Out. How’d it go?

There was one story that was very touching. Alan Jalon confessed to having blasted a young poet 30 years ago. He still felt bad about it, so he decided that he was going to try to correct the review. When he tracked her down, she didn’t want to hear from him. She said, “Why would you revisit the most horrifying experience of my life? I don’t want you to republish this.”

Wow, that’s intense. Any other standouts? Did you recant anything?

For Art Forum, I reviewed an art show exhibiting painter Michel Majerus’s work. I was grumpy about a few of his paintings. They weren’t so hot, but it was a huge show, and I could have easily not mentioned them. But I did. I layed into him for those. He was in a plane crash right after I published that nasty review. I feel like I’ve killed a few people.

Sam Sacks of The Wall Street Journal confessed to having read a very long, boring book where nothing was happening. It was about a woman’s journey home. He skimmed the last two hundred pages because he was so bored. After he published the review, he received a letter from the wife of the author, who informed him that his review overlooked the fact that the protagonist had died two hundred pages previously. If he had read the book more closely, he would have known that.

Embarrassing! Did a lot of people show up to this event?

Yeah, it’s Lit Crawl [a non-profit that fosters interest in literature, novelists and readers alike by hosting big literary events.]

What are some publications that reach the standard of reviewing that you admire?

Well, there are different standards for different venues. Right now, I kind of lean toward the online standard, which is slightly more honest. It can be more forthright because it’s not trying to hide things. In print, you have a lot of competing interests.

Like?

For example, a reviewer might be publishing a book with the same publisher as the book he’s reviewing. Very, very common. Or you have a clearly competitive title. That’s one way an editor will try to manipulate a review. He’ll say, ‘I know Melinda has got a book coming out that’s going to compete with this title, so I’ll have her review it. She’ll blast it!’ Or, alternatively, ‘I know Melinda has a book coming out by the same press, she’s not going to blast it.’ There are some obvious conflicts of interests that happen that nobody talks about. It wouldn’t take very much digging for anyone to connect the dots. But nobody calls them on it. Everyone’s afraid. On the internet, I think people are a little bit more clear about things. I prefer full disclosure.

Are their any high-profile literary critics you take particular issue with? [Silence.]

Are there any drawbacks to the internet as far as criticism goes?

The audience the internet brings is not always a particularly informed audience. An uninformed opinion can be very popular with an uninformed audience. But that’s also one of the good things about the internet. It’s kind of this stabilizing, equalizing medium. Also, writers can work with a better word count. On the Rumpus, you can write a 3000 word review. You’re just not going to get that in print.

Is there anything you hope Revise & Recant will engender?

I’d like to see a column on the most unfair review of the week. It would be fun. If you did it weekly, it would be a little bit of a joke like, ‘Who got called out this week?’ Also, taglines are my big complaint now. Who writes them? I’ve seen several pieces ruined by taglines, which often get the pieces exactly wrong.

Tell us the places you go to read reviews that you find that are pretty solid?

If you’re going to look at the normative places—The Washington Post, The New York Times—I think that’s one option, but I would also look at some of the stronger internet sites. I like checking out all the normal places, but I also like the Rumpus and Guernica. The Brooklyn Rail which is my paper, does pretty well at times.

So...is there a review of one of your books that stands out as being particularly good?

I liked Craig Epplin’s review of Snowball’s Chance in Guernica. It’s about the tenth anniversary of the new edition. I’m very grateful to him for putting all that thinking into it.

There was one critical review of Snowball’s Chance that was spot on. Arthur Salm who wrote for the San Diego Union-Tribune, which is a very conservative paper, wrote a typical criticism of the book, but he read, measured and weighed it. If he’s going to go to all the trouble of doing that then he deserves his opinion. He had a line that read: John Reed Good, Orwell, better. You know, chanting like the sheep. But I felt he’d earned his review.

What do you think of the trend of book critics drawing on personal anecdotes and narratives in their reviews?

I’m all for it. I think it’s very humanizing. Ruth Franklin does it quite nicely. There are a lot of reviewers who do that. It’s a good critical structure. The New York Review of Books is a good example of a place that reviews very well, but they can be a little bit fuddy duddy.

Fuddy duddy?

For example, they are inclined toward noir books and they publish a lot of them. It feels a little antiquated. People don’t talk about this, but in terms of the quality of the prose and material that’s being published now, it is infinitely better than it was 20, 40, or 150 years ago. There are just so many writers. You can do the numbers. How many people were living in London in Shakespeare’s time? About 250,000. Now we’re looking at a population of 6 million writers (I hear). It’s just a very different equation, even if you’re looking at the 1870s in Russia. You’re talking about a population of a few thousand writers. If you delve into the Strand bookstore and look at all the review copies that come out every year you will see extraordinary books you had no idea existed.

I’m not sure that Dostoyevsky would even get published today. If Crime and Punishment were to come out now, where would it come out? Europa Editions? Even for Europa Editions, it’s kind of shifty. Honestly, I don’t know who would publish it. And, I suggest you go burn your classics.

Huh?

For the most part, classics are there because they’ve already gone through the filter of economic and atavistic cultural values. So they are usually there because in some way they extol the virtues of “the way it is.” If you’re looking at contemporary books, you’re much more likely to find something that speaks to you in the present and has a more original point of view.

Who are some of your favorite contemporary writers?

I think more in presses. I like it when a press has a personality. In terms of the big presses, Farrar Straus & Giroux still has a really defined personality. Riverhead Books (an imprint of Penguin) does as well. Big presses have their benefits.

As far as smaller presses, Europa Editions and Boa have strong lists. Unbridled has a good list as well if you're looking for thrillers, as does SoHo Press and Melville House. Melville House has some good literary titles, too. If you’re looking for slightly squishier titles, Algonquin Books (an imprint of Workman Publishing) has some. I identify more with presses and I love the idea of people following presses again.

Are you still the literary editor at The Brooklyn Rail?

Yes, I’ve been there 10 years. I’m the books editor. I got sucked into it after Snowball’s Chance. They stuck up for me. The New York papers stuck up for me when the British papers went after me: The New York Press, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times all came to my defense so that’s how I got involved with The Brooklyn Rail.

Final thoughts?

I love New York and I hope we never have to join the United States.