Sam Tanenhaus

The New York Times has hired internally to replace Dwight Garner at The Book Review after he moved to the daily reviewing beat. The nod goes to Laura Marmor, a deputy editor for the Travel Section. In her new job as Senior Editor, she'll be making a "broad range of review assignments" and help put the section together each week while "collaborating with our editorial team to upgrade our enterprise projects," writes Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus in a memo.

In September, The Times replaced reviews editor and Rome-bound Rachel Donadio with a copy editor at the paper, Greg Cowles.

Memo after the jump:  read more »

Yesterday on The New York Times' Paper Cuts book blog, Times Book Review and 'Week in Review' editor Sam Tanenhaus took a look at James Wood's How Fiction Works, specifically, Mr. Wood's critique of John Updike.

As Mr. Tanenhaus writes, "Wood suggests that Updike’s fiction doesn’t work very well at all, in part because Updike’s prose, like Vladimir Nabokov’s, is oversaturated with pointillist descriptions that, Wood objects, 'freeze detail into a cult of itself.'" He then goes on to quote a particularly florid passage from Mr. Updike's Of the Farm, which Mr. Wood thinks is "an exaggeration of the noticing eye."  read more »

Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced in a staff memo that the editor of the paper’s Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, would also head up the Week in Review section.

Some reacted to the appointment of Mr. Tanenhaus at Week in Review—where he replaces Katherine Roberts, who’ll move to a senior editorial job at NYTimes.com—with concerns that the quality of the Book Review could decline as its top editor is pulled in two directions. The move comes at a time when many national papers have either been folding their book-review sections, or merging them into other sections. And a few weeks ago, Mr. Keller had announced that the paper would seek to fill new jobs from within.

“It certainly signals the demise of newspapers, that they would have two such important sections run by one person,” said one publishing executive at Random House. “It reflects how unimportant books seem to be at The Times.”  read more »

Radar.com has already noted the news that Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the Times Book Review, will take over editing duties for the Week in Review section, according to an internal memo. He'll stay on his job at the Book Review too. The outgoing editor, Katy Roberts, will join Jonathan Landman at nytimes.com.

Bill Keller's memo after the jump...  read more »

In the Times’s new online book club, Reading Room, participants (including author Francine Prose, and frequent Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger) and moderator/Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus are debating a new translation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Another participant is Times executive editor Bill Keller, whose thoughts on the novel seemed not irrelevant to how he perceives the paper and his role there—and reveals more than a little bit about his personality.

“Somehow I managed to make it through college and into late middle age without having read War and Peace… W&P was always too intimidating in scale, and too show-offy to bring to the beach.”  read more »

“Yesterday, I had drinks with a New York Times fact-checker,” said David Bradley, the mu  read more »

“Yesterday, I had drinks with a New York Times fact-checker,” said David Bradley, the mu  read more »

Right-wing ruckmaker Bernard Goldberg has a new enemies list, and the New York Times is on it. Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and columnist Paul Krugman are Nos. 2 and 8 respectively in Goldberg's just-released volume 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken Is #37). Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus isn't in the book, but he might as well be. "I guarantee you," Goldberg told the conservative Captain's Quarters blog last week. "I guarantee you. Guarantee. Remember you're never supposed to say 'never'? I am telling you, [the Times] will never, ever, ever, never review this book."

"Maybe he doesn't think his book is very good," Tanenhaus said by phone. "We've reviewed plenty of books that have been critical of the Times." The editor cited Seth Mnookin's Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning For American Media as a recent example--though Mnookin's account of staffers valiantly ferreting out Jayson Blair's malfeasance was hardly ego-bruising Times criticism.

Tanenhaus also said since Goldberg's book had yet to arrive at the Times, he hadn't seen a copy and couldn't say if a review would be commissioned. Goldberg's publicist called and said a book had indeed been sent to West 43rd Street.

And Goldberg said more was at work than the logistics of promotional mailing. "There's an ideology at the Times," Goldberg said. "They live in a cocoon; a bubble. Inside the bubble there's a certain accepted point of view....The point I was making is it's not that they won't review my book because there's a conspiracy going on. My point was, there's no way they would review a book where their guy is top five on the list."

Goldberg's last book, Arrogance, didn't get reviewed in the Times. But in December 2001, Janet Maslin called his previous book, Bias, "a book larded with specific examples to support his point of view," adding "even among those who reject that premise, or some of the ad hominem bitterness on display here, Bias should be taken seriously."

"I got a fair shake with Bias," Mr. Goldberg said. "But Arrogance went far deeper. Arrogance had an entire chapter on the Times. I'm not suggesting things I don't know anything about. They didn't review that." With his new title, he said, "I'd rather have no review than an unfair review."  read more »

--Gabriel Sherman

"David Brooks and I are very friendly," said New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus.  read more »

"I'm very moderate by nature," Sam Tanenhaus said by telephone from his home in Westchester, two day  read more »