Janice Harayda's Blog

I admire Jalen Hurts a lot as an athlete. But the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback and Super Bowl MVP lacks the skill as writer that he shows on the playing field. The evidence? His deeply flawed new children’s picture book, Better Than a Touchdown (Flamingo Books, 2026), which tells the story of a boy of about 5 or 6 years old is devastated when his school cancels its football program for the year but who still learns lessons in teamwork. The writing is trite, the pictures unexceptional, and as Hurts develops it, the storyline is implausible and even potentially harmful to its young readers.

Want to know more about it? You can read my full review at Jansplaining, my free Substack newsletter.

Have you ever read the print or digital edition of the New York Times Book Review wondered, “Why can’t I find anything I want to to read here? Is it my imagination, or does America’s leading book section just keep getting worse?”

The answers to the two questions are related. You find too little to read there because, in fact, it’s not your imagination. In the past several years, the NYTBR has become a swamp of clichés, dumbed-down content, conflicts of interest, overexposure of star authors, and worse.

Why has the book section declined so much? And what price do authors and readers pay for its failures? I offer a few thoughts in “How the New York Times Book Review Lost Its Way.”

A lot of pundits and late-night comedians have weighed in on Donald Trump’s Gatsby-themed Halloween party at Mar-a-Lago. But for my money, Stephen Colbert had the best line about it, which I quote in my latest Letter from a Reader. These Letters are usually paywalled, but this one’s free because so much literary news is breaking that might interest serious readers: big book awards, an important new literary biography, and much more.

If you need a smile, try the one from Colbert that opens the 11.6.25 letter:

https://jansplaining.substack.com/p/letter-from-a-reader-11625

I live just 77 miles south of Harper Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, so of course I had to pick up her new The Land of Sweet Forever, just published posthumously with an introduction by Casey Cep. The book collects essays and short stories unpublished in her lifetime and a bonus: her recipe for “crackling bread,” a type of cornbread made with pork drippings.

But Lee omits a vital fact about making the bread, possibly because Southern cooks would know instinctively to do it without having to be told. I spell it out in my latest Letter from a Reader at Jansplaining, my Substack newsletter, along with a few thoughts on why Karine Jean-Pierre, Joe Biden’s former press secretary, bungled the interviews about her new memoir, Independent.

I used to think we could never have too many literary prizes. Don’t books and writers need need all the help they can get from awards?

But in the past week or two, we’ve had the Nobel, the National Book Awards shortlist, and more, and the annual year-end cascade is just getting started. And as the number and range of prizes has exploded, diminishing returns may be setting in and making it harder for readers to find the books they might care about most. At @Medium, I consider a question: Is it time to end or scale back the literary arms race? Here’s a gift link: https://medium.com/lit-life/do-we-have-too-many-book-awards-282fea8cc5ed?sk=297d48240c0424a3b9a7eef8c682c163

Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path has become the latest memoir tainted by scandal after a British newspaper alleged that the author may have made up, distorted, or embellished parts of her bestselling book-turned-movie. Why do so many “true” stories fail to pass the smell test?

An editor says readers are at fault because they keep buying the dubious memoirs. But as a critic who’s seen too many of them, I beg to differ for reasons I explain in “Who’s To Blame for Fake Memoirs?”

You might think I’m the ideal listener for the podcast of New York Times Book Review Book Club. I read books. I subscribe to the New York Times. And I love to find new ways to discover books.

But I listened to my first NYTBR Book Club podcast this week, and it was a disappointment. That wasn’t the fault of the book, Yrsa Daley-Ward’s first novel, The Catch, a thriller about twins raised by different families after their mother was presumed drowned when they were infants.

The problem was that the speakers on the podcast–three New York Times Book Review editors–just didn’t get the job done. They didn’t interview the author, gave virtually no background on her work, seemed more interested in cheerleading for the novel than in offering a thoughtful analysis, and let you down in other ways I describe in “I Made the Mistake of Listening to a New York Times Book Review Podcast,” my latest post on Substack.

Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea is turning out to be one of the big nonfiction books of the summer, and with good reason. Elmhirst tells the true story of a married couple who spent 118 days on a raft in the Pacific after a sperm whale rammed their boat and sank it. Their efforts to survive were dramatic enough in themselves, involving sharks, near-starvation, and failed attempts to attract the attention of passing ships. But Elmhirst describes their suspenseful adventure with such high skill that–even though you know the pair lived to tell their tale–you want urgently to know how and why. Curious about what kept them alive? You can read more about it in my latest review at Jansplaining on Substack.

What happens when a liberal-media analyst arrives in a redder-than-red state to promote a book?

You might be as surprised as I was last week when the law professor and MSNBC commentator Barbara McQuade arrived in my conservative town in the Deep South to promote Attack From Within, her recent book about the growing threat to free speech in America and why it’s important to resist it. Over at Medium, I offer a few thoughts the unexpected response her talk received here.

You might think there’s no drawback to the $40 million that Simon & Schuster recently agreed to pay for five books by Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of the No. 1 fiction bestseller, Atmosphere. James Patterson has $150 million contract with the rival firm of Hachette. Isn’t Reid’s bonanza a sign that female authors are approaching something like parity with men?

Not if you remember that 50 years ago, the mystery novelist Mary Higgins Clark signed a $64 million deal with Simon & Schuster, and it’s hurt writers across the board. Over-the-top sums like Reid’s and Clark’s (along with those for Stephen King, James Patterson, and a few other superstars) have helped to turn book publishing into a hits-driven, winner-take-all game. In my latest story at @Medium, I explain why all writers should be concerned about these sky-high book advances.