Generations of literary-minded folk have turned to the New York Review of Books (founded in 1963) and the London Review of Books (1979) for criticism, commentary and more.
Similar publications have followed in their wake, including the Los Angeles Review of Books (2011), the Chicago Review of Books (2016) and even the Cleveland Review of Books (2018).
Pittsburgh author Ed Simon said he thought Pittsburgh should join the fun.
The Pittsburgh Review of Books, published by Carnegie Mellon University’s English Department, debuts Wednesday, Sept. 3. Simon is editor-in-chief. The online journal — informally known as PRoB — will feature reviews, essays and interviews by an array of writers, local and national.
A Pittsburgh take
“It’s an intellectual magazine that is intended for an interested, educated, non-specialist audience about all manner of things across the interdisciplinary humanities,” Simon said. “So coverage of literature, essays about criticism and philosophy and politics and those sorts of things.”
The Pittsburgh Review of Books debuts Sept. 3.
Or, as he quips, it’s “like a more overcast version” of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Simon, a CMU professor, is editor of the Rust Belt-centric Belt Magazine and the nationally recognized author of books including “An Alternative History of Pittsburgh” and “Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain.” And he’s written for such publications as The Atlantic, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s and Salon.
But he’s also a Pittsburgh native, and PRoB’s creation betrays a bit of hometown pride.
“I was like, ‘If there’s a Cleveland Review of Books, there has to be a Pittsburgh Review of Books,’” he said.
Simon also saw a gap in the city’s literary life between the roles filled by news media outlets and the independent website Littsburgh, which tracks local authors and literary events.
He wants PRoB to be “kind of a way in which Pittsburgh writers can be presented to the world and a way in which world writers can be presented to Pittsburgh. So kind of a conduit between the two.”
Inaugural contributors
As a web-only pub, PRoB won’t have regular “issues” per se. Rather, it will release two or three new pieces each week, Simon said.
The initial tranche includes Simon’s own interview with acclaimed historian Jill Lepore (“These Truths: A History of the United States”); Westminster College religion professor Timothy R. Grieve-Carlson’s “Ghosts of the American Left in Millvale,” exploring how Maxo Vanka’s famous church murals reveal contemporary attitudes about labor politics; and novelist Laurie Schecht’s “On Cyborg Fever: The Writer as Curator.”
Monthly columns include Third Person Limited, in which Nathan Pensky assesses the work of novelist Ivy Pochoda; Studilio, this month featuring Sam Lemley’s “On Renaissance Robots, ‘Engines of Flesh,’ and Artificial Life”; and Simon’s own column, The Foundry.
Other inaugural local contributors include memoirist Lori Jakiela and Irma Freeman Center for Imagination founder Sheila Ali, who contributes an excerpt from the new book she edited, “Pittsburgh’s Avant-Garde: 60 Years Inside the Underground Art Scene.”
There’s also an essay by Sony Ton-Aime, executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures. The group, which hosts talks by local and nationally known writers, is a PRoB media partner. This season, the publication will run interviews with each of PAL’s touring authors, starting with LePore but also including Elizabeth Gilbert, Padma Lakshmi and Michael Chabon.
Aside from the location of its headquarters and the mailing addresses of many of its writers, what will be peculiarly Pittsburgh about PRoB?
A matter of perspective
As Simon puts it in the first installment of The Foundry, “Pittsburgh … is a matter of mentality, of perspective.”
“We’re very much interested in things like industry and technology and labor and the environment and how those things intersect with questions about literature and philosophy and what have you,” he said.
PRoB, with its CMU-backed budget, has a staff of graduate and undergraduate students. It does not accept advertisements and is free to all readers (though it will accept donations).
And yes, the publication’s acronym is a little in-joke, courtesy of then-CMU student Jennifer Bortner.
When he was developing PRoB, said Simon. “People kept on getting the name wrong. So I got a lot of, like, ‘How’s the PBR review doing?’”
But Bortner “said Pittsburgh Review of Books should be PRoB … as in ‘problem’ or ‘probabilities’ or ‘problematize,’” he said. “And I thought, ‘Yes, that is what it has to be.’”