Other People's Mail

by Gail Pool

A Biographical Note

I was born in New York City, attended Hunter College High School, majored in Classics at Harvard, and went on to get an MA in English and Creative Writing and an MLS. My husband and I lived in London, New Guinea, and San Francisco before settling, with our son, in Brookline, Massachusetts. We now live in Cambridge, where for many years I taught Writing for Publication at the Radcliffe Seminars.

I’ve been involved in literary journalism for three decades—as a magazine editor, a review editor, a critic, a columnist, and a freelance journalist. For four years I was editor of Boston Review (which was then called New Boston Review) and for more than ten years I was books editor of the Radcliffe Quarterly. I’ve been a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor, where I wrote about magazines and reviewed travel literature; for Wilson Library Bulletin, where I wrote a column on magazine publishing, and edited a book review section; and for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, where I wrote a first fiction column that also appeared in several other newspapers. My articles have appeared in such publications as Columbia Journalism Review and the New York Times.

In compiling Other People’s Mail, I drew on my experience in all of these fields. Both as a critic and as a writing instructor helping writers understand narrative, I became aware of how the epistolary form can have tremendous power and appeal. My wide reading as a book reviewer introduced me to many of the fine writers, some of them not well-known, who appear in the anthology. And once again, as when I was a magazine editor, I thoroughly enjoyed the process of gathering, arranging, and pulling things together.

My new book is Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, which has also drawn on my experience—as a book reviewer, review editor, and reader. A critical—very critical—analysis of the field of reviewing, it appeared in 2007 and has received a good deal of attention. For a full description of Faint Praise, please visit my other web site, which also offers a bibliography of book reviewing, a collection of lively quotations about this much-maligned field, and links to previous articles I’ve written on the subject: www.reviewingbooks.com.