Are you looking for more places to read or write about literary criticism? Today on the Morning Media Menu, we explored The Los Angeles Review of Books, a growing online journal on the West Coast.
Our guest was founding editor Tom Lutz, explaining how the publication has grown over the last year. He also talked about how readers can support the new online magazine and how writers can pitch story ideas to the book review.
Press play below to listen to the interview. Lutz explained how writers can pitch the new journal: “It begins with a pitch from a critic. That pitch can go to this address: pitches [at] lareviewofbooks [dot] org. We look at everything that comes in. A lot of our best stuff comes from people I didn’t know until we started working with them.”
He added some more advice for aspiring critics: “We do fairly little assigning. We don’t find the books that we think should be reviewed and find the right reviewer for them. I’m much more interested in the passion of critics and letting them follow that. People come to me with fairly well worked out ideas. I talk to them (or one of my other editors) about the idea, we develop the idea and edit quite thoroughly.”
If you are looking to pitch other kinds of writing, the journal is also looking for ideas from “professional and freelance writers, journalists, columnists and authors on all topics, whether it is a book review, hard news journalism, feature articles or op-eds.” Keep your query at 500 words or less.
Here’s more from the journal: “To pitch our Editorial Board, send an email to editorial@lareviewofbooks.org. Your pitch will be forwarded to the appropriate editor. Due to the volume of pitches we receive daily, we can only respond to those we accept.”
Full Disclosure: This GalleyCat editor has written for the book review in the past.