San Francisco Review of Books
Encyclopedia
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, commonly known as the Bay Area, is a populated region that surrounds the San Francisco and San Pablo estuaries in Northern California. The region encompasses metropolitan areas of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, along with smaller urban and rural areas...
. Founding editor-publisher Ronald Nowicki
Ronald Nowicki
-Life:In April 1975 Nowicki founded the San Francisco Review of Books, which was published in the San Francisco Bay Area until 1997. The SFRB began as a magazine and later adopted a tabloid format...
launched his publication April 1975, a time when the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
thumb|right|upright|The Chronicle Building following the [[1906 San Francisco earthquake|1906 earthquake]] and fireThe San Francisco Chronicle is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California, but distributed throughout Northern and Central California,...
depended on the wire services for its reviews. SFRB began as a magazine and later adopted a tabloid format.
In addition to the reviews and a coverage of San Francisco's small press scene, it offered interviews with such authors as Eric Ambler
Eric Ambler
Eric Clifford Ambler OBE was an influential British author of spy novels who introduced a new realism to the genre. Ambler also used the pseudonym Eliot Reed for books co-written with Charles Rodda.-Life:...
, Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie is an American short story writer and novelist. She has received an award for excellence from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a PEN/Bernard Malamud Award for excellence in the short story form. Her work has been compared to that of Alice Adams, J.D. Salinger,...
, Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury
Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...
, John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Kenneth "Ken" Galbraith , OC was a Canadian-American economist. He was a Keynesian and an institutionalist, a leading proponent of 20th-century American liberalism...
, Herbert Gold
Herbert Gold
-Early life:Gold was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Lakewood, a community he was later to memorialize in his first book, Birth of a Hero, published in 1951 by Viking Press. He moved to New York City at age 17 after several of his poems had been accepted by New York literary magazines...
, Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan was an American director and actor, described by the New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". Born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents originally from Kayseri in Anatolia, the family emigrated...
, Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosinski
Jerzy Kosiński , born Józef Lewinkopf, was an award-winning Polish American novelist, and two-time President of the American Chapter of P.E.N.He was known for various novels, among them The Painted Bird and Being There...
, William Kotzwinkle
William Kotzwinkle
William Kotzwinkle is an American novelist, children's writer, and screenwriter. He was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He has won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel for Doctor Rat in 1977, and has also won the National Magazine Award for fiction. Kotzwinkle wrote the novelization of the...
, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
and Paul Theroux
Paul Theroux
Paul Edward Theroux is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best known work of travel writing is perhaps The Great Railway Bazaar . He has also published numerous works of fiction, some of which were made into feature films. He was awarded the 1981 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his...
.
Contributors
The roster of SFRB contributors included Alice AdamsAlice Adams (writer)
Alice Adams was an American novelist, short story writer, and university professor....
, Carolyn Burke, Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee is an American fiction writer, poet, journalist and reviewer.Born in Rhode Island, he spent his childhood in South Korea, Kauai, Truk, Guam and Maine...
, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers...
, Thomas Gladysz, Stephen Greenblatt, Pam Houston, Diane Johnson
Diane Johnson
Diane Johnson is an American-born novelist and essayist whose satirical novels often feature American heroines living abroad in contemporary France....
, Emily Leider, Michael McDonagh, Leonard Michaels
Leonard Michaels
Leonard Michaels was an American writer of short stories, novels, and essays. He was born in New York City to Jewish parents; his father was born in Poland. He went to college and earned his B.A. from New York University and went on to acquire an M.A. as well as a Ph.D...
, Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Scott Reed is an American poet, essayist, and novelist. A prominent African-American literary figure, Reed is known for his satirical works challenging American political culture, and highlighting political and cultural oppression.Reed has been described as one of the most controversial...
and Mary Elizabeth Williams. In addition to his editor's column, Nowicki
Ronald Nowicki
-Life:In April 1975 Nowicki founded the San Francisco Review of Books, which was published in the San Francisco Bay Area until 1997. The SFRB began as a magazine and later adopted a tabloid format...
also wrote occasional reviews. Susie Bright
Susie Bright
Susannah "Susie" Bright is an American writer, speaker, teacher, audio-show host, and performer, all on the subject of sexuality....
was a columnist from 1992 to 1994.
When 27-year-old Wendy Lesser
Wendy Lesser
Wendy Lesser is an American critic, novelist, and editor based in Berkeley, California.Lesser did her undergraduate work at Harvard College and her graduate work at University of California, Berkeley, with time in between at King's College, Cambridge...
, with no editing experience, was a guest editor in 1980, she found the experience so rewarding that three months later she launched her own publication, The Threepenny Review
The Threepenny Review
The Threepenny Review is an American literary magazine founded in 1980. It is published in Berkeley, California by founding editor Wendy Lesser. Maintaining a quarterly schedule , it offers fiction, memoirs, poetry, essays and criticism to a readership of 10,000...
.
SFRB received little funding and had no backers, so it relied on a combination of advertising revenues, subscriptions, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and volunteers for financial support. Despite the limited funding, SFRB was published regularly under Nowicki's editorship until the late 1980s. When it was sold in 1989, Nowicki was retained as editor for one year until a successor was installed.
The publication continued well into the late 1990s with various owners, while Nowicki
Ronald Nowicki
-Life:In April 1975 Nowicki founded the San Francisco Review of Books, which was published in the San Francisco Bay Area until 1997. The SFRB began as a magazine and later adopted a tabloid format...
left to interview the last survivors of the Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...
cabaret for his first book, Warsaw: The Cabaret Years (Mercury House, 1992), about cabaret and coffeehouse life between the wars in Warsaw. His articles have appeared in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
, North American Review
North American Review
The North American Review was the first literary magazine in the United States. Founded in Boston in 1815 by journalist Nathan Hale and others, it was published continuously until 1940, when publication was suspended due to J. H. Smyth, who had purchased the magazine, being unmasked as a Japanese...
and other publications. Nowicki has been active in the Polish communities in San Francisco and London, where he currently lives.
Archives
SFRB 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.See also
- GrantaGrantaGranta is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centers on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real." In 2007, The Observer stated, "In its blend of...
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- Prairie Schooner
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- Utne Reader