Opinion | Readers react to an op-ed lamenting the loss of a literary magazine

“But the American magazine is in a state of decay. Now known mostly as brands, once sumptuous print publications exist primarily as websites or YouTube channels, hosts for generic scribblings, the ever-ubiquitous ‘take.’”

His take on a literary death inspired hundreds of comments from readers. Here’s a selection. (Comments have been edited for style, clarity and brevity.)

Fender54: There are two issues, the format and the content. Unless one lives in a big city, there are few options for buying obscure printed magazines. If well-written content can be found online, civilization will continue.

Read the piece: What the death of a literary magazine says about our cultural decay

Sprachnroll: I’m not an academic, just an ex-English major (from a not very prestigious school) who loves “book chat.” In addition to Bookforum, I receive the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the Raritan, as well as literary magazines (the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Sewanee Review).

Christian Lorentzen is absolutely correct: Bookforum was unique, and I treasured it. Unlike the New York Times Book Review section, which, as a subscriber, I receive but seldom read, Bookforum had no agenda: no need to knock someone down a peg or two nor to promote the latest flavor of the month. Bookforum writers expressed their own, not the consensus, opinion and often paid attention to books and writers not receiving much attention elsewhere. It was definitely outside the New York Times-NPR-PBS playlist in which the mediocre is praised as profound and outsider voices unheard. I will mourn its demise just as I do that of the Village Voice. … At least I still have the English literary reviews with their independent voices (even if the Booker Prize has been bowdlerized by admitting U.S. writers).

Wirehairgriffen: I’ve been seeking a word/construct for what I’m observing. “Cultural disintegration.” That taps it.

FrankBech: Even though I’m not familiar with the “little magazines,” I was one of those kids in the ’60s who always somehow was able to get his hands on the latest Mad magazine.

This op-ed was such a good read and it somehow reminded me that I always sort of figured it would turn out this way: Once it becomes extremely easy for everyone to say anything anywhere anytime everywhere to everyone all at once, that it would be a net loss. And I’m not the only one, I’m sure. As a group, we humans yet again are exposed as less than the sum of our individualities. But at least we now know the 10 best things and the five worst signs and the No. 1 thing you absolutely should not eat or do.

mc-squared: There are a few magazines and web projects still producing investigative journalism, some opining on cultural matters, and fewer still literary criticism. It has been said that the United States went directly from barbarism to decadence without stopping for culture in between. Nonetheless, some hearty souls still persevere. I support some of them with donations, but long-form essays are dying along with the American attention span.

decadron: It should be sinking in that for all of the conveniences of the internet, it is going to sink democracy and culture as we know it. And AI is just getting started.

Ace3949: It’s quite an assumption that people who are not interested in reading writers who write about the writings of other writers are somehow vacuous and in intellectual decay. I love reading, and I’d rather read books than articles about books. I read fiction and nonfiction, easy reads and challenging reads, and a lot of long articles on topics I’m interested in. I’m always trying to learn new things. There’s a whole world of media out there, and there are smart, interesting, creative people in every medium.

OrchardApple: The world of literary magazines and literary criticism has become so insular — mostly wrapped around prestigious master of fine arts programs and their graduates — for so long that it does not speak to anything approaching real life. It used to be that you could pick up one of many literary reviews and see a diversity of creative writing and criticism that reflected a wide array of perspectives and talents, which included many, many voices outside of the world of MFAs.

But now, it is almost exclusively the domain of the MFA world, which is composed of people who can spend $30,000 to $40,000 for a degree that generates very little earning potential. While an MFA might hold educational value — even though the writing that tends to emerge is generally (not always) fairly stifled — it is principally a vanity degree.

And so, unless and until literary journals and magazines start broadening who they publish, they will continue to serve a very small and shrinking audience.

carl_christian: Well, all of this is quite alarming, of course. Yet somehow I am daily comforted by the piles of books, newspapers, magazines and journals that relentlessly grow higher and higher with every other mail delivery and also thanks to my neighborhood perambulations past “little libraries” and our marvelous local independent bookstore. Albeit it is sometimes quite useful to have guides and recommendations from an “expert” and/or literary reviewer, I am content to engage with writing of all kinds without the imprimatur of such folks. Serendipity and the fullness of time are reliable enough forces instead that I happily depend upon.

At 66, I am willing to accept that change happens and, therefore, literary journals will come and go. However, the sun will rise tomorrow and somewhere in this house, a pile of precious printed pages will have grown a little taller; and then there’s also the digital deluge of bookmarks, PDFs, saved webpages and the possibility of ever more downloads from the library and the WWW.

myOpinionFWIW: You can thank the “everyone’s opinion matters” ethos of 21st-century America for the homogenized pablum that passes for creative thought. You have to dig deep and be persistent to find anything worth reading, seeing or hearing. The cream used to rise to the top. Now, it just gets stirred into the pail and then watered down to quench the masses.

Zelle17: You only need to look at a few cultural clues as to where we’re headed.

What will our epistolary record of emails, tweets and Instagram posts tell future scholars and historians (the ones who will be able to read and write in complete sentences and paragraphs, that is)?

I know major magazine “editors” whose entire job is to reconstitute online reviews into product listicles for advertisers and whose job performance metric is in how many products they can sell through affiliate links. They’re not even in the advertising department. Editorial. Their spelling and grammar? Not great. Their ability to formulate a thesis and defend it? Let’s not even go there. Needless to say, these are not the editors of yore. Get off my lawn …

And I will be the first to admit that, as someone who used to love to read and write, I’m lucky nowadays if I can make it to end of an article, much less a book. I’m the reason Barnes & Noble is trading at $1.50.

This is our collective cultural brain on rampant late-stage capitalism.

Jamie VA: Literary criticism didn’t die because of clickbait. It died because of its fascination with itself rather than relevance to broader discussions and its fixation on being morally and intellectually superior to things like reading lists.

Mediumisntthemessage: There are more literary journals now than ever before. They are mostly run by writing programs at colleges and universities, and to get published in them you usually have to run in that world, but others break through sometimes. But a mag just devoted to critics? That must have been a must-read.

Nipitato: If there is a better description for our current curdled culture than an “atomized editorless landscape,” I’ve yet to see it.