Letter from the Publisher

It is so hard to get attention for books these days. Publishers lament that space for book reviews in print media is at a premium, but the situation is more dire: there is no space, or vanishingly little. And magazines have cut back on the book-related features—excerpts, essays, author interviews—that once made them lively venues for literary discourse. To get even their “big” titles noticed, publishers have to drill deep into the Web, where bloggers and Internet journals—the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, Slate, Salon—carry on the tradition of writing about books. For those of us who’ve devoted our lives to this precarious but spiritually rewarding trade, it’s what they call on Wall Street a “challenging environment.”

It was all the more gratifying, then, to open the New York Times one day in August and find splashed across the front page of the Styles section a startlingly large color photograph of Millicent Monks, the author of Songs of Three Islands: A Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family, accompanied by a lengthy profile.