Paula Routly: Seven Days Still Publishes Literary Criticism

Seven Days book critic Margot Harrison couldn’t get enough of Tim Weed’s 2025 “cli-fi” novel, The Afterlife Project. In this week’s issue, she reviews the Putney author’s latest release, The Gatepost. In the May 13 paper, we published a feature on investigative journalist Jasper Craven of Barnet, who has a new book, God Forgives, Brothers Don’t, that exposes the toxic masculinity in U.S. military academies. Also in that edition was a short piece on Pollock’s Last Lover, by Charlotte novelist Stephen P. Kiernan.

The week before that, Seven Days reported the results of the Vermont Book Awards. The story referenced our reviews of three of the four winning works, by Sasha Hom, Mima Tipper and Helen Whybrow. Members of our culture team have been writing about the awards ceremony’s keynote speaker, poet Bianca Stone — in more than a dozen reviews, stories and interviews — since 2002.

From our first issue, almost 31 years ago, Seven Days has been a haven for Vermont authors.

From our first issue, almost 31 years ago, Seven Days has been a haven for Vermont authors. We can’t consistently acknowledge all of their books — the collective output is too great — but we come pretty darn close. Simply put, there’s a lot of literary criticism in these pages. In a state that’s home to multiple writers’ programs and residencies, as well as a vibrant network of independent booksellers and literary events, it’s an essential part of our cultural coverage.

Increasingly, though, media outlets in print and online have abandoned this “content” — as it’s now called, which in itself is a good indication of where most news publishers are heading.

In a recent piece, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner acknowledged the “near-extinction-level wipeout of the American book review,” a silent tragedy that “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,” Garner writes. “In the 1960s, a good first novel might receive 90 individual newspaper reviews in America and England, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote in his memoir ‘Ardent Spirits.’ By 2009, the year ‘Ardent Spirits’ was issued, he reckoned the number was 20 at best. What would it be now? Two? Three?”

In February the Washington Post announced the end of its stand-alone weekly literary section, Book World. “A lonely and shellshocked survivor of this demise,” as he describes himself, Garner is now one of an estimated five full-time book critics left in America. He argues that America’s literature is imperiled without “serious, fervent and quick-witted criticism: public talk, back and forth, between competing voices, in something like real time.”

Garner’s career in journalism started here in Vermont: While a student at Middlebury College, he became a stringer for both the New York Times and the Vanguard Press, Burlington’s original alternative weekly. His editor at the latter was Pamela Polston, future cofounder of
Seven Days.

Between those papers, Garner and I worked together at the Vermont Times, where he was my editor. While by day he assigned, edited and assembled the arts and culture section, by night he wrote freelance book reviews for the Village Voice, the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Oxford American.

I looked on in amazement — and Salieri-like envy — as Garner moonlighted his way out of Vermont to book editor jobs at Salon, then Harper’s Bazaar and finally the New York Times Book Review. After a decade there, he became a book critic for the main paper. Since 2008, he’s written a review almost every week. I don’t know a more talented writer.

So, I’ll give him the last word on the importance of reading and writing about books. Garner concludes: “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.”

I’m proud to say: Almost every week, Seven Days is doing its part.