The New York Times Book Review has lost its way
How America's leading book section has sold out its readers and failed books, authors, and journalism as it tramples on the paper's standards
When the New York Times went behind a paywall, a literary critic and scholar predicted that the move might kill its book review section at no loss to readers. The Times had turned reviewing into “an incestuous system of backslapping and mutual admiration, rather than any independent judgment of the quality of books under review,” Anis Shivani wrote on HuffPost.
Shivani was right about the logrolling but wrong about the fate of its book section. The New York Times Book Review has survived the paywall, only to become even worse than his scathing article said. Yasmin Nair summed up the decline in a blistering overview last year in Current Affairs magazine, aptly titled “The NYT Book Review Is Everything Book Criticism Shouldn’t Be.”
What was striking about the two critiques is that both came from left-leaning media you might expect to support the liberal Times. Nobody is surprised anymore by assaults on the newspaper from the right, such as Donald Trump’s post on his Truth Social last month: “The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again.”
The failures of the New York Times Book Review have become so clear, it seems, that even its potential allies can’t ignore how it’s sold out its readers, or that smarter and better-written reviews appear week after week in right- or left-leaning media such as Slate, the Guardian, the Atlantic, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. But recent criticisms of the 128-year-old book section have tended to focus narrowly on topics such as its perceived slights to books by minority or conservative authors.
These valid concerns can mask a larger issue: the journalistic failures of the only major American newspaper with a free-standing book section. The Times could review more books by minority or conservative writers and still treat them unfairly if it trivializes them or assigns them to critics with biases or conflicts of interest. This reality may help to explain why the quality of the NYTBR has plunged as the paper has hired staff from more varied backgrounds.
Nothing makes the depth of the biases at the book section clearer than a comment by Pamela Paul, its former editor, whom Gilbert Cruz replaced three years ago when he moved over from the Culture desk at the paper. Paul said in an interview:
“We love the publishing industry, and we support what they do, but really we are here for readers.”
It’s hard to imagine a Times health care reporter saying, except sarcastically, “We love Big Pharma, and we support what they do, but really we are here for patients.” Or to envision a Capitol Hill correspondent saying, “We love Congress, and we support what they do, but really we are here for voters.” Either might bring a sharp rebuke from an editor: Journalists aren’t supposed to “support” industries or politicians—they’re supposed to support the truth. Standards that prevail elsewhere at the Times fall away at the book section, a loose cannon on the deck of values upheld not just by the paper but journalism in general.
How does the Times show its love for the publishing industry?
Numbers suggest it has a special affection for the Big Five1: Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillan, and Hachette. In 2024, 80% of its 10 Best Books of the Year list came from Penguin Random House, the nation’s largest trade book publisher and a book-section advertiser. This year PRH published 50% with 40% coming from other Big Five publishers and one from a major independent, W.W. Norton, another advertiser. None came from a small, university, or indie press. The Wall Street Journal, with a more limited book section, nonetheless found four worthies beyond the Big Five for its best-of-2025 list: three from university presses and one from a small publisher.
The Times shows its love for its favored authors in part by overplaying their work. Last year the NYTBR did three stories about Anne Tyler’s lackluster 25th novel in addition to listing it among the “Books We’re Excited About” and the year’s “Notable Books,” giving it more space than did four other major review outlets combined: The New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. This fall it devoted a full page to the 15th book by the historian Joseph Ellis, The Great Contradiction, which its reviewer panned and Times might have covered fairly in half the space.
Tyler and Ellis have won Pulitzers, and you have to wonder if NYTBR editors have too much reverence not just for Big Five publishers but for literary awards that can hit or miss. At papers with limited space or budgets, reviews are a zero-sum game: One author’s gain is another’s loss.
On the combined pages the NYTBR gave to Tyler and Ellis, it could have run capsule reviews of a dozen books by less well-known writers who might have deserved the space more. It doesn’t help that stars often get further exposure on Times bestseller lists, some of which the paper could move online or publish in a smaller font, and any of which can run side-by-side with stories about those authors’ books.
Harder to spot can be mismatched books and reviewers. Few editors would be so crass as to tell a critic that a paper wants a good review of a favorite author’s book.
But there are ways to stack the deck. Editors can assign reviews to freelancers who have given only praise to an author in the past or whom they otherwise know to love writer’s work. Or they can assign books to critics who have the same agent, editor, or current publisher as an author, knowing that most would be unlikely criticize someone with a stake in their success. Editors can have books by scholars reviewed by others in academia whom they might someday need to recommend them for awards or teaching positions. They can also assign their favorites’ books to staff who know what they expect, or to their friends or relatives, such as Cree LeFavour, an occasional NYTBR reviewer who’s married to the Times book critic Dwight Garner.
Such realities may help to explain why the book section has been running more staff-written reviews: They lower the risk that a critic will slam a darling of the editors or have one of the undisclosed conflicts of interest the paper says it tries to screen out. Staff biases and conflicts are, in some ways, easier to hide.
At their best, in-house reviews have vast benefits. Salaried staff may feel freer to express honest but unpopular opinions that outsiders might withhold for fear of losing future assignments. They may be able to spend time on a book that freelancers might find harder to give when reviewing traditionally pays chickenfeed.
Stellar reviews have come in recent decades from staff critics—most notably, Jonathan Yardley, Michael Dirda, and Carlos Lozada at the Washington Post2, all of whom won well-earned Pulitzers for their work. You could hardly find three critics whose voices differ more than those of the fearless and acerbic Yardley, the witty and erudite Dirda, and the politically astute but fair-minded Lozada, all of whom thrived at the Post. Anyone who doubts their value needs only to read one of the reviews that won Dirda a Pulitzer: his brilliant pan of The Creators by Daniel Boorstin, the former Librarian of Congress. You’re unlikely to see anything like that masterpiece of negative reviewing in the NYTBR, and not just because it lacks a critic of Dirda’s intellectual firepower.
What are the New York Times standards on clichés?
Book-section editors’ work involves several essential tasks. One is selecting books for review. Another is matching them with well-qualified critics, and a third is making sure that what they publish meets the standards of their news organizations. Yet their efforts at all of those may miss the mark if they don’t keep reviews engaging and intelligent enough to hold readers’ attention amid Americans’ waning desire and ability to read books.
To varying degrees, the New York Times Book Review is failing at all of those tasks. But some lapses may be clear only to authors, editors, or others who follow literary news closely enough to compare its reviews to those published elsewhere.