New York Inquirer interviews Keith Gessen of the literary magazine n+1, sometimes rival to McSweeney’s. I like his comments on book reviews:

One of the few rules we have for book reviews is that they can’t be about dead authors. It’s very easy to say I love Tolstoy or Flaubert or whoever, and my contemporaries are not up to that standard… It‚Äôs fun, I’ll admit‚Äîbut in the end nothing could be less interesting or useful. And nothing could tell us less about the way we live now.