About San Francisco Review of Books

San Francisco Review of Books

The San Francisco Review of Books, usually shortened to SFRB, was a book review periodical published in San Francisco, California, from April 1975 to 1997. It was founded by editor-publisher Ronald Nowicki at a moment when the city's dominant newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, depended on wire services for its book reviews, leaving the Bay Area — one of America's richest literary regions — without a local review of its own. Nowicki's answer was an independent monthly devoted to reviews, author interviews and coverage of San Francisco's small press scene. The Review began as a magazine and later adopted a tabloid format. It survived for more than two decades on a shoestring, supported by advertising, subscriptions, National Endowment for the Arts grants and volunteers, and it is remembered both for the writers it attracted and for an accidental legacy: it was a guest editorship at SFRB in 1980 that inspired Wendy Lesser to found The Threepenny Review.

A correction to some directory listings is warranted: although SFRB is occasionally listed under Berkeley, the periodical was a San Francisco publication, based in San Francisco and published in the Bay Area, with its publisher identified in its own issues as San Francisco Review of Books of San Francisco. Berkeley enters its story through neighbouring institutions, including the University of California library that preserves it — not as its home.

Founding in April 1975

Ronald Nowicki launched the San Francisco Review of Books in April 1975. The founding insight was institutional rather than literary: the Chronicle, the region's newspaper of record, was relying on syndicated wire copy for book reviewing, which meant that Bay Area authors, presses and readers were being served by reviews written elsewhere, for other audiences. A locally edited review could cover the national and international book world from a San Francisco desk while paying particular attention to the region's own publishers. Nowicki served as founding editor-publisher, wrote an editor's column, and contributed occasional reviews himself. The publication he created carried the ISSN 0194-0724 and established itself as a monthly, a regularity it maintained, despite minimal funding, for the whole of his editorship, which lasted until the late 1980s.

Format: From Magazine to Tabloid

SFRB began as a magazine and later adopted a tabloid format, a common trajectory for undercapitalised literary periodicals, since tabloid production on newsprint was cheaper than magazine manufacture. The format changed, but the contents kept their character: reviews of new books, interviews, and attention to small presses. Surviving issues show the range. The April 1978 issue — volume 3, number 12, a 48-page stapled number — featured Susan Sontag on its cover, with an account of a 1978 Sontag talk and two reviews of her work, an interview with the poet Stan Rice, and pieces on Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye and on Ursula K. Le Guin. Charles Bukowski appeared on the cover of the April 1979 issue. These were not the choices of a provincial newsletter: Sontag, Bataille, Le Guin and Bukowski were central figures of the era's literary argument, and SFRB was reviewing them from San Francisco within months of publication.

The Interviews

Interviews were one of the Review's signatures. Across its run, SFRB published interviews with authors including Eric Ambler, the master of the modern spy novel; Ann Beattie; Ray Bradbury; the economist John Kenneth Galbraith; Herbert Gold; the director and actor Elia Kazan; Jerzy Kosinski; William Kotzwinkle; Henry Miller; and Paul Theroux. Peter Dreyer's interview with Henry Miller appeared in the February 1977 issue, placing one of American literature's most controversial figures in conversation in a two-year-old San Francisco periodical. The list is telling in its mixture — novelists, an economist, a film director — reflecting Nowicki's conception of a review of books as a review of the whole world of writing, not of fiction alone. For Bay Area readers in the later 1970s, when long author interviews were far less common in general-interest publications than they later became, these conversations were a substantial part of the Review's value.

Contributors

The Review's contributor roster connected it to the wider literary world. Writers who contributed included the novelist Alice Adams; Carolyn Burke; Alexander Chee, who would become a prominent novelist and essayist of the next generation; the poet and City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a foundational figure of San Francisco letters; Thomas Gladysz; the Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt; Pam Houston; Diane Johnson; Emily Leider; Michael McDonagh; Leonard Michaels; Steven Moore; the novelist Ishmael Reed, whose papers at the University of Delaware document his SFRB connection; and Mary Elizabeth Williams. Susie Bright, the feminist writer on sexuality, was a columnist from 1992 to 1994, in the Review's later years. That a volunteer-supported tabloid could draw Ferlinghetti, Reed, Greenblatt and Adams to its pages says something about the loyalty a genuinely local literary institution could command in the Bay Area of the period — contributors wrote for SFRB because it was theirs.

Covering the Small Press Scene

Alongside reviews of nationally published books, SFRB covered San Francisco's small press scene. This was deliberate editorial policy and, in retrospect, one of its most useful functions. The Bay Area in the 1970s and 1980s sustained a dense ecology of small publishers, literary magazines and independent bookshops whose output the national review media ignored. By reviewing small press books next to the products of New York houses, the Review acted as the region's literary record: it told local readers what their neighbours were publishing and told local publishers that their work was being read with the same seriousness as anyone else's. Its role can be compared to that of the trade and little-magazine press elsewhere, but in San Francisco, for most of its life, SFRB performed the function essentially alone, the Chronicle's reliance on wire reviews having left the field open.

Money: Advertising, Grants and Volunteers

The Review received little funding and had no backers. Its survival for over twenty years rested on a combination of advertising revenues, subscriptions, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and volunteers. That funding patchwork was typical of American literary periodicals of the era, but SFRB's version of it was unusually exposed: with no university, foundation patron or wealthy owner behind it, every issue depended on small income streams arriving on time. Despite this, the Review was published regularly under Nowicki's editorship until the late 1980s — a run of roughly fourteen years of monthly publication achieved essentially by persistence. The economics explain both the shift from magazine to tabloid format and the eventual sale of the title: an institution built on its founder's labour could continue only as long as he was willing and able to supply that labour at its real, unpaid rate.

Wendy Lesser and The Threepenny Review

The Review's most consequential single event may have been an act of hospitality. In 1980 Nowicki invited Wendy Lesser, then twenty-seven and with no editing experience, to serve as a guest editor. Lesser found the experience so rewarding that three months later she launched her own publication, The Threepenny Review, choosing a title with what she called obvious Brechtian overtones. The Threepenny Review, published from Berkeley on a quarterly schedule, became one of America's most durable literary magazines, and Lesser has recounted its origin at SFRB ever since; a 2005 San Francisco Chronicle profile of Threepenny's twenty-fifth anniversary told the story in full. In the ecology of Bay Area letters, SFRB thus played the role of an incubator: the established review gave a novice editor a complete issue to practise on, and American literary journalism gained a major journal as a direct result.

The Sale of 1989 and the Final Years

In 1989 the Review was sold. Nowicki was retained as editor for one year, until a successor was installed, and then departed. Under various owners the publication continued well into the late 1990s, with its final issue dated 1997, twenty-two years after the first. The later Review kept some of its character — Susie Bright's column ran from 1992 to 1994 — and its pages could still carry substantial literary argument; an article by Peter Dale Scott published in SFRB in November 1993, "Case Closed or Posner Exposed," was later expanded online. Nowicki, meanwhile, turned to the work that had been waiting behind the editorship. He travelled to interview the last survivors of the interwar Warsaw cabaret for his first book, Warsaw: The Cabaret Years, published by Mercury House in 1992, about cabaret and coffeehouse life in Warsaw between the wars. His articles also appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek and the North American Review, and he later published The Elusive Madame G (2013), a biography of Krystyna Skarbek, the wartime agent also known as Christine Granville. He has been active in the Polish communities of San Francisco and London, where he lives.

Archives and Availability

Because SFRB was produced cheaply and distributed regionally, its survival depends on library holdings, and the record there is respectable. The Review can be found in several major libraries, including the New York Public Library, the San Francisco Public Library and the library of the University of California at Berkeley. Individual issues also circulate in the antiquarian trade — the April 1978 Sontag issue, for example, is catalogued by specialist booksellers — which has kept the periodical visible to collectors of both Sontag and Bukowski material. For researchers, these holdings make it possible to reconstruct how the Bay Area read the books of the 1970s and 1980s at the time, rather than through the filter of the national reviews the Chronicle had been reprinting when Nowicki decided the city needed a review of its own.

Assessment

The San Francisco Review of Books was a modest institution with an outsized footprint. It identified a genuine gap — a great literary city whose newspaper had outsourced its book judgement to the wires — and filled it for twenty-two years with reviews, interviews and small-press coverage produced largely on volunteer energy and arts grants. Its interview list and contributor roster show how much literary capital a determined local editor could mobilise; its connection to The Threepenny Review gave it a permanent place in the genealogy of American literary magazines; and its founder's subsequent books carried its sensibility into other fields. When it closed in 1997, San Francisco lost the independent local book review Nowicki had created in 1975, and the function it performed — sustained, local, serious attention to books and their writers — passed, as it had before, to publications elsewhere.