Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?

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Critic’s Notebook

Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone?

What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature.

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Justin Kaneps for The New York Times

By

Dwight Garner

April 27, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

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In 1981, Donald Barthelme published “

Challenge

,” a funny and weirdly prescient short story, in The New Yorker. Its premise was that Japanese book-reviewing technology — bots that deliver “sleek, space-efficient” pieces — were putting American critics out to pasture. The death of the American book review was nigh.

One machine, the Nakamichi Model 500, was capable of “deconstructing a book of average length in seven seconds, with 0.5 distortion, signal-to-noise ratio of 124 db, and a damping factor of 60 — a technological feat well beyond the capacity of any U.S. review.” By comparison, Barthelme wrote, American book notices tended to be bulbous and plodding and written by John Kenneth Galbraith or Joyce Carol Oates.

Other units had different accessories and upgrades. The Sanyo Model 350 suppressed undue enthusiasm with a “special microprocessor unit.” Nikko’s Model 770 came equipped with a three-foot-long “clip-on extension probe that actually

reached out and touched the reader’s heartstrings

, aided by dual LED heartstring meters.” The bots were similar, but each had their quirks:

Close readers (“review nuts”) could discern a mushiness in the midrange in some Mitsubishi reviews; the upper registers of a Yamaha review were, in some models, unpleasantly shrill; Subaru’s notices were thought to be “charitable.” (Sansui’s use of industrial robots in book-review assembly was not in itself considered innovative; The New York Review of Books had been using robots, usually British, for years.)

There’s a lot going on in “Challenge,” as there always is in Barthelme’s cool and surreal fiction. For one thing, the story is an unconventional relic of the “Japan Panic” of the 1980s, when anxious Americans, especially those with stock portfolios, feared Japan’s industrial dominance might supersede our own. The Japanese were making better cars and spawning sharper technology. When Mitsubishi bought a majority stake in Rockefeller Center at the end of the decade, few missed the symbolism.

“Challenge” was also a scattershot satire of the state of American book criticism. Barthelme zinged Galbraith and Oates and the Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt for being pokey, the Times Literary Supplement for paying its reviewers chump change and Publishers Weekly “for its exclusive employment of 13-year-old girls.” Forty-five years later, “Challenge” has lost little of its subversive electricity.

Barthelme’s story was prophetic. Even before the rise of A.I. there was a near-extinction-level wipeout of the American book review. It has gotten eerily quiet out there — it’s as if the bees, those kibitzing and sometimes stinging pollinators, have vanished — and few have noticed.

Only yesterday, it seems, nearly every American newspaper, dozens and dozens of them, even in midsize cities, ran book reviews by local critics. The alternative weeklies (I wrote for many of these) had feisty and clamorous and occasionally nutty book sections. “Sometimes an off-the-wall review,” Norman Mailer said, “can be as nourishing as a wild game dinner.”

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