“[Because the hiring process for reviewers] emphasizes writing as if it were a monolithic skill, editors often end up with reviewers who write well but may not be good critics, and authors whose skills may be entirely inappropriate… Fiction writers don’t necessarily have a good analytical sense of why a piece of literature succeeds or fails, which is the most useful aspect of the review for the reader…. In hiring authors because they are authors, review editors are turning to writers whose main interest isn’t likely to be reviewing; most fiction writers, poets and biographers are primarily interested in writing

Still, editors and editing will be more important than ever as the Internet age rockets forward. The online world is not just about millions of newborn writers exulting in their powers. It’s also about millions of readers who need to sort through this endless universe and figure out which writers are worth reading. Who is going to sort out the exceptional ones? Editors, of some type. Some smart group of people is going to have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the more refined that separation process is, the more talent — and perhaps more training — will