Corner of Liisankatu and Meritullinkatu, Helsinki, Finland. Eeva Rista, 1970 (Wikimedia Commons)
Book Post is a bite-sized, newsletter-based book review, sending reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to readers’ in-boxes.
With Book Post I (your editor) aspire to step into the void left behind by the books coverage readers once came across in the daily paper—a short look into a new book, opening a window onto the world of arts and ideas, that fits into the rhythm of the day. We know readers are overwhelmed; we try to serve up a moment of calm and insight in a cacophonous world.
• Every Wednesday we send a short, thoughtfully commissioned and carefully edited book review by a writer we think you will appreciate to paying subscribers’ in-boxes, sharing the work that means something to them. I was employed for many years editing book reviews with the best, and I try to offer each week a little jewel to carry on those traditions, reward a few moments of your attention, and open up your world a little bit to big ideas.
• Every Sunday afternoon we send to the broader list of our free followers a reflection on reading by one of our writers, or some thoughts about the book industry and the fate of writing in contemporary life from me.
Book Post is housed in Substack but it is not “a Substack,” in that I am not giving you my own ideas but assembling for you a little corsage of ideas by writers I think will delight, inform, and move you.
About me: I worked for a long time as a book review editor (at The New York Review of Books) before embarking on Book Post. I also created small literary magazine (Little Star) and manage a literary estate (for the poet Joseph Brodsky). Before all that I worked as a junior editor at the publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux and as a bookseller at an independent bookstore in the eighties. While I was at FSG I was also an assistant to Susan Sontag. So I bring to Book Post many years of immersion in editing and book culture.
I began Book Post out of a belief that we need new forms to bring news of books to contemporary readers and to freshen readers’ connection to enduring ideas in a media landscape that favors hot takes, easy put-downs, and clan-building. I believe that we have, in culture, more in common than we think we do, and a connection upon which we can build.
I also believe that writers should be paid, and I advocate for forms of publishing and book distribution that are supportive of writing and intellectual labor. And I believe we must spread American readership beyond its current boundaries. Our society seems to me hungry for access to enduring ideas and a shared culture, however broadly defined. Book Post is my way of trying to grow into that possibility.
I am so grateful to you for taking a look at Book Post and hope you will like what you see.
Your editor,
Ann Kjellberg
Sharing the pleasures and benefits of the reading life across a fractured media landscape.