Letter from a Reader 6.15.25
The New Yorker magazine stumbles in its new book-recommendation newsletter, how Britain became 'as poor as Mississippi,' and an answer to: 'How many books do you need to sell to make the top 20%?'
Have you ever suspected that the New York literary establishment is dancing with itself? Or woefully out of touch with people like you and me? If so, pat yourself on the back. The New Yorker has just proved you right.
A few days ago, the magazine launched a weekly email newsletter called What We’re Reading in which rotating writers and editors will recommend books new and old. I’d stopped subscribing to The New Yorker in part because one of its marquee critics had called a book “unputdownable,” a word that in my case is always a lie because I can put anything down.
But the magazine doesn’t give up on you easily, and over the weekend I found the first What We’re Reading newsletter in my inbox. It had six brief reviews of books, a mix of fiction and nonfiction, chosen by Namara Smith, a New Yorker editor. All came from Big Five publishers—Hachette, Macmillan, and Penguin Random House—leaving you to hope the newsletter won’t slight small and university presses.
Smith pitched each recommended book to a group to which she’d given a cute name in what seemed to be a strained attempt at wit. And she lost no time in insulting her potential readers. First on her list was Andrew Martin’s Down Time (Macmillan/FSG, 2026), a novel Smith saw as right for “aimless millennials.” I’m not aimless or a millennial and couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for a book about what she called “obnoxiously self-absorbed characters” who eventually become “somewhat less annoying.” So I moved on to her next suggestion, Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and the Traitor (PRH/Crown, 2019). Smith had me there—I like Macintyre’s true tales of espionage—but I wondered why she recommended that book instead of, say, his Operation Mincemeat. She also suggested Cold Comfort Farm (PRH/Penguin, 1944) by Stella Gibbons, another author I like, for people she calls “neat freaks and masterminds.” I’m neither a neat freak nor a would-be reformer like her heroine, but I was willing to cut Smith some slack for having recommended a worthy classic.
Then I read her plug for Stephanie Wambugu’s first novel Lonely Crowds (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2025), and it stopped me cold. Smith said the book “did not get the recognition it deserved when it came out last year.” That idea seemed so out of touch with reality it was hard to give Smith more benefit of the doubt.
