The Lightning Room: Blog People

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Welcome, once again, to Blog People, a venture here at the Lightning Room in which interview editors Simon and DeWitt interview their fellow denizens of The Blog. In our third installment, Simon interviews Randon Billings Noble, our reviews editor.

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1. What do you do outside of PANK? I’m always curious to hear about the daytime lives of people working in the small press/literary magazine community.

I write – usually essays, right now a collection of them – and wrangle our three-year-old twins.

2. Where are you, spiritually and geographically? Our team is a far-flung one.

Geographically? Washington, DC. Spiritually? New York. Or Sunshine, Wyoming.

3. Can you tell us about your first-ever experience with PANK?

Nope.

4. What were a few fantastic books that you read in 2013? Movies you saw?

Body Geographic by Barrie Jean Borich

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore

Boxers & Saints by Gene Luen Yang

Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist by Eva Saulitis

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

5. I would imagine, as Reviews Editor, that you have to keep track of a huge number of presses and publishers putting out new work – how do you manage this, and how do you decide what kinds of books are ‘right for PANK’?

Many books come to me, which is a boon. And we have a terrific perspicacity of reviewers[1] who often suggest titles or send pitches. But I also visit the New Releases shelf at my public library and read reviews wherever I find them – in the New York Times Book Review, in literary journals, on bookstore shelves where staff post recommendations, in waiting-room magazines, in tweets, on blogs. And many of my friends on Facebook and followees on Twitter are writers so I’m always hearing about new titles.

PANK is interested in books that provoke. Thought, speculation, puzzlement, engagement, faith, doubt, wonder, glee, twinges, pangs, throbs. The only other requirement is that the book should have been published in the last year or so.

Unless, of course, the book is being reviewed in our Books We Can’t Quit series, which features reviews of books that are at least ten years old and just won’t let us be. Look for the revival of this series in April!

6. What are you looking for in an ideal book review? What’s one book you’ve always wanted to review or interrogate but never worked up the courage to write about?

An ideal book review is thoughtful and honest. It is, to quote our guidelines, “Witty but not dry. Ravishingly intelligent but not overly academic. Bold but not glib. Anecdotal but not breezy. Personal but not narcissistic. A little cheeky? A little lyrical? Sure. Slightly pissed off? Okay. Swooning? Always.”

I just started reading Moby Dick for the first time. I am by turns entranced, disgusted, impatient, absorbed, laughing, shivery and pretty much walloped. I think I have the courage for it. I just need to find the time.
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[1] I so wanted there to be an entry in The Book of St. Albans to give a particular name to a group of reviewers – a “browse of readers” or an “apercu of essayists” or a “shrivel of critics” from An Exaltation of Larks didn’t quite hit the mark. PANK’s reviewers are certainly perspicacious, so a “perspicacity of reviewers” it is!

 

 

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Randon Billings Noble is an essayist. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New York Times; The Massachusetts Review; Passages North; The Millions; Brain, Child; Sweet: A Literary Confection; Rain Taxi Review of Books; The Georgia Review and elsewhere.  A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and a resident at the Vermont Studio Center, she was named a 2013 Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow to attend a residency at The Millay Colony for the Arts.  Currently she is a nonfiction reader for r.kv.r.y quarterly and Reviews Editor at PANK.  You can read more of her work at www.randonbillingsnoble.com.