Who Decides What Matters In Books?

This week, I chat with Ann Kjellberg, founding editor of the literary magazine Little Star and Book Post, a bite-sized newsletter-based review delivery service, sending well-made book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers, direct to your inbox.

Start with a single question: who gets to decide what matters in books—algorithms, crowds, or critics who sign their names? We sit down with editor and publisher Ann Kjellberg to trace a life spent inside literature, from Yale and Farrar, Straus and Giroux to The New York Review of Books, Little Star, and her Substack, Bookpost. Along the way, we explore how clarity, curiosity, and community can still hold the center in a noisy culture.

Ann shares how working with émigré writers, including Joseph Brodsky, shaped her view of editing as a craft of ethical clarity—making difficult ideas legible without flattening a writer’s voice. We look at the mid-century boom that birthed the paperback revolution and an expanded reading public, then contrast it with today’s attention economy, where BookTok trends and Amazon ratings often drown out patient, thoughtful criticism. Ann doesn’t dismiss reader enthusiasm; she pairs it with the need for accountable reviews that analyze, cite, and argue—skills that teach us how to think rather than what to buy.

We also celebrate indie and radical bookstores as engines of civic life. From hand-selling that starts lifelong reading relationships to nonprofit partnerships that put free books in schools, these shops build the pluralist spaces many communities lack. Ann explains why Bookpost rotates partner bookstores to steer purchases locally, and why a weekly, well-matched review can re-anchor conversation in substance. If you care about the future of reading, criticism, and the free exchange of ideas, this conversation offers a map—and a reason to keep showing up for books and each other.

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Ann Kjellberg - Book Post

Transcript

Cold Weather, New Projects, Gratitude

SPEAKER_01 0:44

Here we are well into 2026. And while it's freezing and snowing in the Midwest and East Coast of the United States, there are finest in temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Victoria, Australia. Please be careful out there. A few days ago, my team and I rebranded and launched The Narrative Exchange, a home for readers, writers, and story-driven conversations. At www.thenarrativeexchange.com, you can find information about the bookshop clip comes to purchase tickets for the Lunch with an Orth literary series in OHIN and Santa Bunfort, and register for upcoming writing classes with brilliant authors. We have a few literary surprises up my sleeve, so make sure to check into the site regularly and get tickets for events only, as the venues have limited space. A quick shout-out to the University Club, a partner in Santa Bunfum, and to Hotel Elver Blum, O'Halle's longest-standing hotel since 1919. I love this hotel. One of the reasons is because they serve the best coffee eventually. Remember that if you purchase tickets for lunch with the North American and El Room Blum and decide to stay the night, you will receive a literary series discount on the cost of your room. A couple of other places well worth visiting while you're in Ohio, and the stunning hikes in the family, are in a classic American dinner, Money Loose for Breakfast, and our exquisitely renovated movie theater, the Ohio Playhouse, which is directly across the street from Hotel and Robin. As this is my platform, I would be remiss if I didn't thank everyone around the globe, especially those in Minneapolis, who were standing up for social justice and human rights. According to The Guardian today, quote, Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good are two of at least eight who have either been killed by federal agents or who have died while in immigration and customs enforcement custody in 2026. So far, end quote. Here's this week's episode. Anne Chilberg is the founder and editor of Bookpost, a newsletter-based book review delivery service. Chilberg was on the editorial staff of the New York Review of Books from 1988 to 2017. In 2009, she founded the literary magazine Little Star. She is the literary executor of the poet Joseph Brodsky, an editor of several editions of his work. Hi Anne, and welcome to the show. It's good to have you here. I'm so grateful to be here. Thank you for having me on. We have a lot to talk about, and I know you and I could talk about books all day. But let's begin with learning about you and how your early creative life was influenced. And during your time studying English at Yale, what moments or mentors shaped your creative identity?

Discovering Publishing Beyond Academia

SPEAKER_00 3:49

Well, a thing that happened, I was very fortunate for me, that was a real kind of pivot in my life, was that I had been quite scholarly and bookish as a child, and my reading in college was very much in the past, kind of the Renaissance and classical works and so on. I did take one course in um like mid-century poetry with like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath, and that was sort of opened my eyes a little tiny bit. I would later work at Ferris Strauss, where some of these authors had been published and people knew them. But uh at some point I realized that I was going to have to get a job, and I thought I was too shy to be a teacher, and I really didn't know what else an English major could do. I just had no idea. So I went to one of my professors and asked for a suggestion, and she seemed quite bewildered too. The assumption seemed to be that we were all going to be professors. But then she's remembered that she had done an anthology of women reading, I think in the 18th century or something, for a small publisher in Boston called David Godine. And so she said, Why don't you talk to them? And this was, I was, I'm an old person. So this was a long time ago, and it was before internships were really a thing. I just said, can I just come and work, you know, hang around in the summer and do things there. So I worked for Godine. He was this uh very visionary character. He was one of many publishers, small publishers who arose from letterpress. He began having a printing press and making beautiful editions and then um sort of eased into publishing out-of-print books and then publishing his own writers. So I got this really from the ground up view of publishing, just of course kind of by chance while I was in college. And this thing began to happen in my life where I began to have this opportunity to see writing from the ground up, like from people being made by real people, which was so different from my experience as a student. And there I think of this time going from college to my uh twenties when I was, I worked in a bookstore for a while and then I came to New York to work in publishing as sort of this dawning realization that live humans write books and you can be a part of that. And um, and also that there's a whole kind of ferment or an intellectual world of people talking about books that's outside of the academy and academic ways of writing. It was really an awakening for me.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

And how do you see the sensibilities or disciplines from that period, for example, with Godin showing up in your work now?

Ferrar Straus, Brodsky, And Freedom

SPEAKER_00 6:08

Well, I think there was a next thing that happened for me that Goden kind of led me to, which was I um I worked at a no longer exist in bookstore in Harvard Square, and somebody gave me the good advice that um if I wanted to work in publishing, I should work in a bookstore because few people in publishing do. Um, so I worked in this fantastic bookstore in Harvard Square where everybody read a lot. And it was again like just regular people reading, no longer homework and being scholarly, um, and kind of this great like world of um of reading for excitement and adventure. And then I part of what I was supposed to be doing in the bookstore was looking for publishers that were doing the kind of work that I wanted to do. So I had this chance to really kind of study that and see how the publishers had different sensibilities. And so I homed in on Ferrer Strauss and said that, you know, this is really where I would love to work. They did had a lot of really great writers, that they were still independent. This was before a lot of the consolidation that is had in publishing, and there you could see a lot of kind of independent spirit in the way different books were published. So I got a job there and I was paid so poorly, even by the standards of editorial work in publishing, that I had to kind of hire myself out to the other writers to make ends meet and pay my rent. And so I became involved through that. I started working for this Russian poet named Joseph Brodsky. And through him and other people, this was like the end of the Cold War. So there were all of these writers in in America and around New York who had escaped from communism or who had, you know, had had left uh very difficult circumstances in other places. And a lot of them were kind of self-educated. They hadn't come up through the university system at all. They weren't teaching in writing departments. So there again, I had another kind of rush of this infusion of people reading and having a writerly life that was uh separate from the academy. And they had a kind of a whole different canon than what I'd ever heard about, like the books that people read, um like Miwosh, Chessov Miwosh was also published by Ferrer Strauss. And um, you know, we we uh we read The Captive Mind and uh all of these kind of thoughts about writing against totalitarianism and writing kind of as an act of freedom or a way of being uh a sort of freely cognizant being, um separate from oppressive circumstances. So these are just incredibly lucky things that happened to me, but really shaped my uh I had a real sense of continuity between the kind of serious work I'd studied in college and these people who were able to take on literature in a in a serious, muscular intense way and felt very continuous with the literary tradition, but were also completely modern and living in the the modern world.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

You touched on something that I feel is incredibly important, and that is the writers who are not academics, people who have barely gotten through high school, if they're lucky, as you said, the self-educated. And I think there's a certain freedom that comes with that. Were people in the United States ready or were they hungry for these writers coming in from Europe?

SPEAKER_00 9:23

I feel they really were. And my experience of this was then shaped by my next job, which was after Ferris Strauss, I went to work at the New York Review of Books. And the New York Review really came out of this period of ferment, which also produced a lot of, you know, mid-century publishing, where, you know, Jason Epstein, who was one of the founders of the New York Review, was also one of the uh parents of the um literary paperback, like creating works that were important works that were accessible to a general audience and could be sold at prices that people could afford. This was an invention. This was something that wasn't always around. And the part of the circumstances there, but also the thinking was that all these people had come back from the Second World War and were permitted to go to college on the GI Bill. So there was this suddenly new rush of an educated public. And, you know, my boss at the review, Robert Silvers, had actually been at the University of Chicago in college at the same time as my father, who was a returning GI who, you know, none, no one in his family had any advanced education. And Bob used to say of that time that for him it was very powerful to be in the university alongside all of these people who had been in the in the war, whose families had never gone to school and who had been raised in working class environments, that it was a great moment of um of kind of a broadening of the reading public in America. And the New York Review was really built around this idea that any kind of knowledge is available to anyone, and you should be able to write about physics or economics or history in a way that a special someone who's not a specialist in those fields can appreciate. Um, so this way of writing was kind of associated with uh the New York intellectual or the public intellectual, and there was this real effort then, I think, to forge a way of doing critical writing, kind of looking to England, where there's a long tradition from, you know, when you look at Orwell or a lot of the essay writers of England who did not write in a kind who who aimed to write for a general audience through the press, um, to really cultivate in writers the ability to write for a general audience uh without letting go of kind of robust intellectual standards. And now looking back, that really seems like a thing of that time. Like that's not quite the way people think of it anymore.

The New York Review Ethos And Clarity

SPEAKER_01 11:49

Yeah. I sometimes wonder if back then we had more creative freedom than we do now. I mean, goodness me, look at what's happening in our libraries across the states with book banning, people being told what they have to read and what not to read. This is a critical time for freedom of speech in the United States. I'm kind of going off track a little bit here, but there was something that you said that reminded me of a book that I read of Martha Hall Kelly's recently. The book was centered in Martha's Vineyard around World War II, and part of the story involved the birth of the paperback. I knew nothing about this, and I thought it was fascinating because the paperbacks were originally made so that the soldiers could squish them up and put them in their back pocket. And this, of course, led to higher book sales, and it also in this country led to more people reading. I'm always fascinated when I read a book of fiction that brings some truth into the historical part of the book.

SPEAKER_00 12:50

Yeah, it's amazing. You know, we now think with regret that, you know, there are no longer um all of a lot of the institutions that used to bring us great writing or, you know, writing with a um kind of more diversity of voice. But these things were really buoyed up by the particular economics of that time. Um, like another really interesting thread of that is bookselling and how, you know, it used to be that independent bookstores were, you know, isolated in metropolitan centers. And, you know, if you lived in the countryside, you it would be hard for you to find a bookstore. But all of these innovations in distribution and stuff made it possible for there to be a lot more bookstores. At the same time, people were becoming more broadly educated. At the same time, there was a lot of, you know, it was a great time for print advertising. So the New Yorker and the Atlantic and Harper's and the New York Review of Books were able to absorb all of this advertising because they had a captive audience and you know, produce uh really, really robust writing and pay people a living amount of money to write for them. So all these things coalesced in a very healthy environment. A great book about this is uh called The Free World by Lewis Menand. He talks about this in all the arts, also in music and in visual arts, which is a story we sort of knew at the review because Jason Epstein was a presence.

SPEAKER_01 14:15

Excuse me, I'm making notes while I'm listening to you speak. I need to get that book. Let's talk about editing. What drew you to the world of editing?

SPEAKER_00 14:23

Oh, well, I think it might have had something to do with the fact that I began in this kind of scholarly spirit. I really thought of writing as a very, very august um exalted thing to do, and I never thought of myself as being worthy of that. I mean, another thing that's a characteristic of my time is that I I went to school before the writing departments really began. You you wrote literature by studying it. Um so I didn't quite have the uh sense in myself that that was like a a career or thing that I could consider doing. But I really wanted to be inside books. I just wanted to be w with books and reading. And when I began editing at Farris Strauss and then at the review, I to me it was an almost um euphoric experience. You just I think it, you know, translating is an even more extreme version of this sort of thing where that yourself just disappears and you become this, you're sort of swimming through this language and trying to help it be uh what it means to be or what it's trying to be. Uh and I just loved it. I still love it. And I was fortunate to be in places where uh that was a available work.

SPEAKER_01 15:38

I love what you just said about swimming through the stories and the characters. That's beautiful. Were there particular projects or authors during that time that changed how you think about the editor's role in literature?

Paperbacks, Distribution, And A Broader Public

SPEAKER_00 15:52

My encounter with Brodsky was very important to me from this point of view because he's uh you know he was a major poet in Russian. He emigrated to the United States as a middle-aged person. So he his English was not fluent, you know. Um, but he he really wanted to live in America and be an American and be a part of American culture. And so he was very driven to translate his own work and for his translations to at a very high level capture his thinking. But his English was not uh not from childhood, he was like quite recently learned. So this was like an incredible editorial challenge, and he had a lot of um attachment to his own particular formulations. So uh I was this young person, I I just loved this work. I mean, working with a person I I now uh have a couple of writers I work with who are not native speakers of English, and uh there's just something especially thrilling about that kind of editing because that people have such uh advanced and complex ideas that are just, you know, it just need to be slightly moved a little bit to to fit into English as it's it's spoken. You don't want to kind of strip away its originality or its particular flavor. So the fact that I was doing that in it at this kind of challenging level when I was sort of a young person was a real uh uh a kind of calisthenics of editing. Working at the review, uh Robert Silvers, my my boss, had a very clear North Star kind of, which was to was clarity. His final goal always was that work should be clear to the reader. And you know, he was very much informed by there's an important essay by George Orwell called, Oh my goodness, it's suddenly escaping me what it's called. Politics in the English language. Basically, he was talking about the dangers of ideological thinking creeping into language. And he said that when it when you use jargony language, or when you use kind of the language of a guild or a clique, you're always assuming that people are a member of your clique. So you you need in order if in order to be fully uh open and to be treating people in a non-tyrannical way, you have to give them the tools, you have to use the language that they understand. So uh clarity of expression was a a sort of ethical ideal at at the review. And all of the editing was kind of formed around this. Like you can take a something very difficult and naughty and make it available to people. So the rest of us, us who like were kind of maybe a little bit coming up in the world and maybe feeling a little um slightly rebellious, would push against this and try to work in more literary language, or maybe language that was a little bit more eccentric, or try to do something different. And this was kind of the state of play among us youngsters at the review. Is really robust muscular commitment to clarity and kind of uh transparency of language, and then a wish to honor style and eccentricity and difference of voice.

SPEAKER_01 18:59

Well, thank heavens for everyone in that sentence, because we need people to push back and we need new ideas, but we do need rules, I guess, you know, to to so that we can break them. That's what I always think anyway. We need the rules to break them. Yeah. What inspired you to found Little Star and Later Book Post? And how did each publication reflect a different response to the literary culture of its time and to your own evolving sense of what literature can do?

Why Editing Became A Vocation

SPEAKER_00 19:28

Yeah, well, Little Star, I started at a moment where I um I had no place else to go at the review. I probably had no place else to go earlier than Little Star, but I uh I various things had happened. I I I was kind of stuck. And but it was uh it was 2008, there was a stock market crash, there were very few jobs in publishing, it was very hard to move at all. And then I suddenly became aware of the possibility of self-publishing. Like at this point, uh the Amazon Kindle, I don't think existed yet, but uh there was an outfit called Lulu where you could load up a PDF and produce um a bound book. And it suddenly began to occur to me, and there was also like now there was uh like book design um software that a normal person could use, and you didn't need to have so much investment in order to have a literary magazine, which is had always been kind of a dream of mine. And I did from working in poetry and from working at the New York Review, sort of know people. Like I could reach out and convince people um to come in and join up with a literary magazine. So I just quite eccentrically, in the absence of a job, decided to start a literary magazine, which was really foolish. And I think what I was also responding to, which was something maybe visible from my particular vantage, in that I'd worked at a publisher that published a lot of kind of big writers from mid-century. Um, and then I was working at the review, which had also come out of this 20th century past as a sort of juggernaut, that I felt the presence of the writing of the past, of um of kind of the more senior figures and their connection to modernism or their connection to kind of the struggles in Russia or the struggles of Eastern Europe or in other parts of the world. I felt in was beginning to feel in publishing and in literature this really strong, which you can really see now, this very strong emphasis on the new. The commercial pressures mitigate against keeping uh in view the whole kind of extension of literary life, how it it comes to us from the past and it it sort of grows over time. So with Little Star, I really wanted to have a magazine that had young people and uh and older people side by side. Side and that kind of made reference to uh kind of gradations in the tradition as it reached this point. And I made it an annual, which was an eccentric decision too, because it's uh it doesn't really kind of fit on the shelf or it doesn't fit into distribution patterns. But I just felt as though some of these magazines, magazines come out so often and you feel like you can't keep up. So I wanted to have something that really just was a special thing that happened just from time to time and that people might look forward to. And I just loved doing it. It was it brought me great joy.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

And from there, did you move on to book post?

Working With Brodsky And Language

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Yes. What happened is that I was I was getting ready to do a next little star, and I heard from the people who were developing Substack that um they were looking for new things that hadn't come out yet. And I guess they were proposing to me that I do a Substack version of Little Star. And I was thinking about that. I had had an app, like I'd I had been doing a lot of thinking about how you could try to get kind of classical or print value work into the digital world. It seemed as though, you know, there was a time of blogs and social media was just starting, and I was sort of like, how can how can we bring into this world things that are more finished and polished? How how can we make you know kind of reflective, slower reading a part of this instantaneous experience, which is still what I think about? So I had made an app out of Little Star, and that was kind of fun. And uh for a while it even had music in it, it had a work of art, a poem, music, and all you know, all this would come to you once a week, and it was just this kind of little bouquet. So uh Substack came to me about doing that, but um, it was at the time of the 2016 election, and my boss, Bob, had had died. So the New York Review was completely up for grabs, kind of like nobody knew where it was going to go, and the political world was very uprooted. And in the middle of that, I decided to do something different. I decided to take Substack up on the offer, but instead of doing Little Star, I would do a book review because I was just worried about the disappearance of book reviews. You've probably talked with people about this on your podcast. It's a big issue in publishing that people don't read book reviews anymore. They used to come with the daily newspaper, with People magazine and stuff. The disappearance of the book review, and it seemed to me connected with this moment where like we had lost touch with what we used to call the fact-based conversation, like that it was had become so easy to lie, or that there was it was so easy for disinformation to spread. So if we could find a way for people to harken to books a little bit more, to where places where people had really worked out an argument and worked on something for a long time, that maybe it would be grounding and would help us to kind of bring the cultural conversation to a more grounded place. So that was sort of my vision when I started out with BookPost. And I thought maybe that I could keep doing Little Star on the Side, but I hadn't managed to. It proved overwhelming. So it's been going for about eight years? I I first began thinking about it in 2016, but I think the um I my first I first really got going in 2018.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

You've raised something that's important to me, and it's about the rise of platforms like Amazon and Goodreads, and how they've blurred the line between reader and critic. How do you see this shift shaping our collective sense of literary value?

SPEAKER_00 25:28

You know, this has become so salient a question very recently, because uh, you know, the associate a bunch of things happened recently, like the Associated Press stopped doing books criticism, and you know, there was a a sort of rush of articles, but you know, uh critics were reassigned at the New York Times, and but we've been seeing it a long time where in the book world, kind of first bookstagram and then TikTok and became more commercially meaningful than and book reviewing. This sense has become more and more dominant that it's the it's the individual person who does more to influence how books are received than than critics. I do find it exciting and fun and great in a lot of ways that people have this ability to express enthusiasm for reading in a public way. And I think it has brought a lot of people in and given people who do read an opportunity to feel more a part of the public conversation. But I persist in book reviewing and in publishing commissioned book reviews by people with experience in the field because I think we need to have a critical dialogue. We need for books and ideas to come into a setting in which they're evaluated critically in order to have new ideas confront a critical mentality instead of just being received in a promotional way or a reportorial way, and also to sort of model for people how you appraise ideas and judge them for soundness. I think it's a very dangerous thing. There's a famous essay by Rebecca West that's um, I think it's still linked at the top of The New Republic, where it's called The Duty of Harsh Criticism. And it was written in 1918, I think, or the you know, around the time of the First World War. And it's about how without an active critical culture, people become just recipients. They just accept what they hear and or accept whatever seems kind of sexy. And I think that's a a real danger in our society.

Style Versus Clarity In Critical Writing

SPEAKER_01 27:29

I'm sure you've seen this too on Amazon or Goodreads. Someone will post a review, give it one star, and their comment will read something such as, I didn't like this book because it wasn't what I thought it was going to be, or it wasn't the genre I thought it was going to be. And that counts as a review of the book. I call this out because I used to write book reviews for the New York Journal of Books, which no longer exists. Now they had guidelines as to how to write a review, which was fantastic. And I can't tell you how much I learned during that time about how to write a substantial review. First of all, you didn't use, you know, I I didn't like the book. You would never say that because if there was something about the book you didn't like, you had to quote it and dissect it. And this gives the review substance. It was a deeper experience, and you knew that the person writing the review had actually read the book. If I'm asked to review a book or to have an author on the on the podcast, I will look at their backlist. And if I'm interested, I'll have the publicist send me a copy of the book. My days of looking at reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are over. Uh I will read a professional review and and maybe a few from different platforms. And if there's a reviewer I trust who kind of has similar tastes to me, I will definitely read their review. So how do you feel about this?

SPEAKER_00 28:56

Yes. I mean, you uh you point out that I led your question a little bit off track by not answering about Amazon and Goodreads. I think people are very innocent about how easily these platforms are gamed. You know, it's it's very easy to round up a bunch of your friends and get positive reviews, or it's easy for like a sort of a group of people who have an objection to something to steer the whole thing off course. And uh, I had students once who um I was teaching a course in literary journalism, and they couldn't even quite compute or didn't know what I was talking about. When I said there's a difference between a critic who's hired to review a book and a person who does it voluntarily on a website, you don't know who they are, they don't have the backing of an organization. I was so struck that for students this distinction didn't really seem meaningful anymore. And the students would sometimes say, I trust a regular person more than a reviewer because the media is full of its own agendas. And, you know, they you they can't be trusted because they're owned by corporations or whatever, but they actually trust that this person who they know nothing about is an honest broker.

Founding Little Star To Bridge Generations

SPEAKER_01 30:08

You know, I kind of understand that. I mean, it's something I may have said about 15, 20 years ago. And let's face it, we are told a lot of lies. But anyway, sorry I interrupted. Keep going.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

One thing you were getting at there was that um the part of being a media aware person is that you know how to understand what you're reading. Like when I read reviews of police pace of books in different places, I know what these places are, I know what their pre preconceptions are, I know what where this is coming out of. You learn how to be a critical person who can evaluate what you're reading. And when you develop those skills, you begin to see that just accepting whatever kind of washes up through the algorithm to you is is not a very discerning way to evaluate opinions.

SPEAKER_01 30:55

Yes, I completely agree. What can people expect to see if they sign up for your Substack on Book Post?

SPEAKER_00 31:03

Well, my original vision was I called it a um a book review subscription service, which is that you would sort of subscribe to these reviews and I would send them off to you one at a time. Um I wish I did more, but I do one a week. I I spent a long time going through the catalogs and seeing what comes out and then pairing up books with with writers that I think will who I think will be great and that people will uh want to read. There I spent a long time assigning book reviews when I worked at the New York Review, so I have a sort of a feeling for who's out there. And I think the people writing about the books are really interesting and um and the books themselves are really interesting. And then another thing that I kind of fell into um as a sort of a side gig on book post was that I started writing about the whole universe in which people receive books myself as a sort of commentary to the side of these book reviews. I still consider the book reviews the main show, but I you also receive from me writing about bookselling, about publishing, about small publishing, about self-publishing, about all the things that are going on that affect how how people receive books. And the main purpose is to help people search them out and and find bookish places.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Yeah, I always come back to don't let Amazon tell you what to read. Walk into an indie bookshop and start up a conversation with a bookseller, a human, not an algorithm.

SPEAKER_00 32:30

I think I feel like one of the things we hear so much nowadays, especially since the pandemic, is that people are have become disconnected from one-on-one communication, from you know, that they're at home, they're connected to these devices, they're not part of social communities and exchanges among people. And a bookshop is just the most marvelous manifestation of a way to be in touch with your fellow beings, because you're in a place that's in your home or in a place you visited that you're interested in. The other people who work there also live where you do, like they're connected with the ideas that are circulating in your community and in your world. If you go in there a lot, they'll remember you, they'll know who you are. There are people who are not doing this for the money, definitely. They're doing it because they love it.

SPEAKER_01 33:22

Yes, absolutely. And you and I have both been booksellers.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Yeah.

Building Bookpost For Critical Dialogue

SPEAKER_01 33:27

I think it's one of the best jobs in the world. It's exciting. I mean, you have to be strong, you have to be healthy, you have to be able to lift books. I so enjoy that feeling of putting a book in someone's hand and for them returning a few days later and saying, I love this book. What else can you recommend? And just like that, you've started a relationship, and that's what builds communities. And that to me is what indie bookshops do. They build communities, and for now there's safe spaces. You can go in there and have conversations. Uh, you might disagree with people, but because you have this little thread of reading that has brought you together, you understand and respect each other, hopefully.

SPEAKER_00 34:07

Yeah, well, you point to something really important about a bookshop, which is that it's fundamentally represents an idea of plurality. A bookshop is filled with different things that you choose among. Nobody's telling you what to think. And these are people who are committed to putting all of these things together and letting people find their path. So I think that there's such a valuable presence in communities. Like, I one of the things I do with book posts is that I choose a different independent bookstore to be my partner every couple of months so that I'm linking to them instead of linking to Amazon. And I write a little portrait of them. So I spend all this time reading up about these different bookstores. And there are so many towns in America where a bookstore has taken root and it's kind of been a part of reviving Main Street, bringing people back into the town. You know, cafes begin to come back, people like wander up the sidewalks. They bring authors into the town so that it becomes events where people, people gather around ideas and learn new things. And you meet the people who've who created these bookstores, and they're the most marvelous people you can imagine. They've they they really love the place they're from or a place that they've discovered that they feel a great affinity for, and they're expressing that by having a bookstore and by kind of offering this to everyone who lives there.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

I have a name for this. I call it literary gentrification. Many bookshop owners I've spoken with over the last five years moved to another location out of a larger city during lockdown, and when they discovered it didn't have an independent bookshop, they opened one. You know, there used to be more radical bookshops globally, and then they started closing, but now I'm noticing them taking root again. And for this, I'm truly excited about. Have you had much experience with radical bookshops?

SPEAKER_00 35:58

I have. I think this is a really interesting question. I I'm involved with a project that um helps bookshops create nonprofit structures so that they can have a nonprofit attached to them that raises money to do some programs like giving away books in schools or having events in in the community uh to help, you know, with the dangers, the difficulties of their margins, especially, you know, to allow them to open in places where people aren't so wealthy. And this group has tended to focus on bookstores that are not, don't have a particular political valence because they're kind of committed to this idea that of pluralism. And I see that, but the bigger pluralism picture includes the radical bookshops, like it uh, because you do have the choice to walk in or not to walk in. And you know, a very political bookstore gives people a place to go, to discover, to organize, to be a part of a group, and and to be informed, you know, not to just uh be kind of um agitating on your own. Um, they are about reading up. I mean, when you you look at the history of black-owned bookstores, a lot of the formative ones in the 50s and the 60s and 70s were formed around liberation uh thinking, around um creating social movements. You know, there's this bookstore in Chicago called Women and Children First that kind of frontlines uh feminist writing, but also, you know, has a big children's section, a lot of kids in it, um, you know, a lot of LGBTQ space. So it gives people for whom who are looking for those communities like a really, really valuable gathering point. So I think it's a great way of allowing variety to blossom.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

Yeah, I think you're right. And I found too that radical bookshops have community space, they encourage community gatherings.

Algorithms, Goodreads, And Real Criticism

SPEAKER_00 37:55

And this is something we need right now. It really is. They, you know, there's this new trend of the silent book group, and it's like that people get together and in bars and stuff and just read together without talking. And to me, that's such a sort of testimony to this little ironic beauty within reading, that it's something that you do on your own, but it is a part of being a part of the world. You're doing you're you're you're reading in order to empathize, in order to think as another person, in order to learn about bigger worlds. So I really feel like books and bookselling and libraries also are, you know, that we already have here among us these institutions that serve us in this way, these ways, and we need to make them less vulnerable because they we need this kind of way, these ways of being together so much.

SPEAKER_01 38:47

And where can people find you and book post online?

SPEAKER_00 38:51

I have a website that's bookpostusa.com, which leads you to uh the substack. And the substack, which I I gave it a name even before I had a name for bookpost, is very simple. It's books.substack.com. And I would look I would welcome, I would be happy to give anybody watching this a free subscription so that they can um so that they can check it out. My email address is a k-j-e-l-l-b-e-r-g, which is hlberg at bookpostusa. And just write to me and tell me that you would like a subscription. I'd be happy to send it to you.

SPEAKER_01 39:23

Perfect. That's wonderful. Thank you. Anne, is there anything else you'd like to mention before we end this conversation?

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Oh, just what a pleasure this is. I mean, it's it's really marvelous to talk with someone who has such a focus on on reading itself and the way that the books are received in the world and um both bookstores and working work um events with authors. This is where I think that in the absence of um uh of pervasive book criticism, we need to think about creative new ways of putting people in touch with reading and making it part of community life.

SPEAKER_01 39:58

Anne, it's been great chatting with you. Thank you so much, and I and I hope you come back soon.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

I'd love to, anytime. Have a good day.

SPEAKER_01 40:06

You've been listening to my conversation with Ann Chilberg from Book Post, and I will put the link to her substack in the show notes. To help the show reach more people, please share episodes with friends and family and on social media. And remember to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to this podcast. To find out more about the Bookshop Podcast, go to thebookshoppodcast.com. And make sure to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to the show. You can also follow me at Mandy Jackson Beverly on Instagram and Facebook and on YouTube and at the bookshop podcast. If you have a favorite indie bookshop that you'd like to suggest we have on the podcast list, I'd love to hear from you via the contact form at the bookshoppodcoms.com. The Bookshop Podcast is written and produced by me, Mandy Jackson Beverly. The music provided by Brian Beverly. My personal assistant is Kaylee Tishingen, and demographic designer is Alex Mooney. Remember to check in www.themarative exchange.com. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time.