When The Washington Post’s management axed Book World in February, it wasn’t just one casualty among hundreds of layoffs; it was the latest high-profile death blow to a newspaper book review section in more than two decades of a thousand cuts.
The AP stopped publishing book reviews last fall. Metro dailies like the San Francisco Chronicle whittled down or eliminated standalone book sections a quarter century ago, leaving The New York Times Book Review “the last discrete newspaper books section standing,” former Washington Post nonfiction book critic Becca Rothfeld wrote in The New Yorker. (After the Post layoffs, The New Yorker hired her as a staff writer.)
Bookseller Josh Cook has taken note of the black hole swallowing newspaper-published book reviews. In the past, “you could just encounter [book reviews] in your world” via the physical presence of local newspapers, he told me in the back office of Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., on a recent Friday afternoon. (He pointed to now-shuttered alt weeklies The Boston Phoenix and DigBoston as another extinct source of book reviews.)
So Cook, a co-owner of PSB, decided to do something to bring newspaper-style book reviews back. The Porter Square Review of Books launched this month. The store’s booksellers and writers-in-residence have begun publishing weekly(ish) book reviews on its website, on Thursdays; at about 500 words, these are deeper looks at books than the couple of sentences you’ll find describing “staff picks” in-store (or on your Goodreads or StoryGraph). The team shares them on Bluesky and will round them up in a monthly newsletter.
“A lot of bookselling is the first couple steps of writing a book review anyway,” Cook told me. “You assess it to see if you like it, you figure out how you’re going to describe it to other people, you decide whether you’re going to finish it…We already are part of the way there. Why not just see if we could do it?”
Readers of #BookSky Announcing The Porter Square Review of Books! Starting RIGHT NOW, the PSRB will publish one review, written by a PSB libromancer or a Writer in Residence every week or so…
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— Porter Square Books in Cambridge & Boston (@portersqbooks.bsky.social) June 4, 2026 at 3:48 PM
We’ve covered some examples of indie bookstores and local media joining forces. But watching the broader erosion of local media, Cook has argued that publishers — with their writers and editors, printers and distribution networks and warehouses — have the infrastructure to help rebuild American journalism. Last year, he described a “swing for the fences” vision in the third of a series of essays for Literary Hub on what the publishing industry should do in the face of a second Trump administration. “Imagine major publishers collaborating on a weekly newspaper based on the Lit Hub model,” he wrote, “filled with long form and narrative journalism written by authors with forthcoming or recently released books, distributed to bookstores and libraries to give away for free.”
Cook reupped that essay after the Post layoffs, writing on Bluesky that big publishers “have the resources to rebuild the media wasteland” and “if they want people to discover books at all, it kinda looks like they need to.”
While publishers have yet to rally to that call to arms, it got Cook thinking about what Porter Square Books could feasibly do in this spirit. Book reviews seemed like the obvious starting point.
A lack of books coverage, including book reviews, “hurts everyone in the books ecosystem: readers, writers, publishers, and, of course, bookstores,” Porter Square Books said in its Book Review announcement. “Putting that in the context of contemporary attacks on the rewards and pleasures of deep thinking and imaginative creating only makes things more dire. Well, we’re not just going to complain about it!”
Cook has written book reviews for sites like The Millions, The Rumpus, and Bookslut. The first level of a good book review, he said, is to “give readers enough to know if they want to read it.” That doesn’t just mean a summary; it should give a sense of style and tone. “After that, I like reviews that put the book in its various contexts,” he added, whether its genre, that genre’s history, or “the broader scope of books.” Finally, he thinks a good book review should “give prospective readers some tools to read the book if they decide to — some perspectives, some things to be aware about” that will likely enhance the reading experience.
Cook wrote the first PSRB review, of Violet Allen’s Plastic, Prism, Void: Part One, himself. He also edits the Review. It will mostly cover new releases, and the store tries to “throw our support behind smaller presses and less well-known authors, so you’ll probably see a bit more debuts, a bit more lesser-known books,” Cook said.
Reviews will span genres and authors — a middle-grade review is in the works now — but what gets reviewed will mostly depend on booksellers’ personal tastes and appetites. Last week, PSB events & marketing assistant Isabel Miranda Kidwell reviewed Chloe Caldwell’s 2014 novella Women, which she discovered on the store’s “damages” shelf. “This little book, simple cream-colored and bent at its left corner (more so now, actually, from my grip) is one I will never let off my bookshelf,” she wrote, “and this review is my small attempt at getting others who, like me, had previously never heard of it — too bombarded by the ‘canon’ classics or today’s NYT bestsellers — to pick it up and read it.”
Because many PSB booksellers are horror aficionados, Cook expects that genre to be well represented. Jacob Orlando, a bookseller at the Boston location of Porter Square Books, recently reviewed The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer. He called it “a tense and terrifying trip perfect for a cabin weekend, a long drive or just a few late nights hoping your lights don’t flicker” while calling out some sections that “drag” and “loose threads.”
I was curious whether Cook expects to publish wholly negative reviews. “There is a place for negative reviews in the world of books, but I’m not really sure it’s in the 500-plus word stuff that we are doing,” he said. For one thing, “We are paying our booksellers [for the reviews], but not enough to read a book they don’t like.” In his view, negative reviews tend to have value as part of broader conversations about well-known books or authors. When done well, though, he thinks a negative review “can recommend the book to a different type of reader.” (He pointed to former New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani; when she panned a book, “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m interested in this book,’ because she could describe it in such a way that I would see what would appeal to me, even though she didn’t like it.”)
While Cook will post reviews on Bluesky and Instagram, he expects them to reach readers primarily through the newsletter, based on success PSB has seen with its other email newsletters (its events newsletter, built up over two decades, has around 20,000 subscribers) and the more deliberate reading experience email offers to stumbling across a link in a feed. PSB staff are discussing ways to highlight reviewed books in the store (I noticed Plastic, Prism, Void on display as a staff pick in Cambridge), and will consider the possibility of rounding up reviews in print annually. But for now, success to Cook would mean, simply, “handfuls of sales of reviewed books,” he said.
That’s all they’d need to cover the cost; “Each additional handful we add, we can think about other things,” Cook said. “And if the Review got 5,000 subscribers, which I think is ambitious, that would tell us something else.”
Photo of Porter Square Books taken by Sophie Culpepper
