Nairobi HeatMukoma Wa Ngugi
The CanalLee Rourke
Alison Flood reports in the Guardian that a Harvard Business School study finds that “Amazon reviews are just as likely to give an accurate summary of a book’s quality as those of professional newspapers.” The study, “What Makes a Critic Tick? Connected Authors and the…
I’m sitting in a room with nine other people, each one of us an employee of (or employer at) a thriving publisher that grew out of — and still publishes (duh) — a litblog. So Iván Thays‘s latest post over at El País, which he…
“There is no such thing as the literary establishment. I know this because I am part of it,” writes Geoff Dyer in a Guardian essay. But why not just try and define what we mean by “establishment” since we’ve all used the term? (Including, as quoted in the…
Writing in the Financial Times, John Lanchester—the author of the novel Capital—asks why it is that so few novelists and poets tackle banking and finance: You can assemble an entire canon of the greatest English language poets from men who had lengthy professional careers in…
How wonderful to be reminded of John Leonard’s rules for criticism in the debut issue of “The Slate Book Review.” There Troy Patterson reviews Leonard’s posthumous collection of essays, Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958-2008, and smartly quotes from the 2004 essay “Smash-Mouth Criticism,” wherein Leonard…
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into YouTube, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles is back …
Geoff Dyer, a nominee for the first ever “Hatchet Job of the Year” prize for his negative review of Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Adam Mars-Jones won the award yesterday for his review of Michael Cunningham‘s By Nightfall, as reported on MobyLives ), was…
“His ‘killingly fair-minded and viciously funny” review of the Pulitzer prize-winning author Michael Cunningham‘s latest book, By Nightfall, has won novelist and critic Adam Mars-Jones the inaugural Hatchet Job of the Year award, says a report in the Guardian. The Hatchet Job of the Year…
Is Moon People by Dale M. Courtney the worst book ever written? That’s what Gabe Habash says in a hilarious post at the Publishers Weekly blog, PWxyz. Of course, not that long ago, Habash declared that the how-to book Microwave for One was the worst book ever written. Before that,…
The quarrel broke out in summer 2010, has just been reignited, and, unresolved, will no doubt rear its head again. Jennifer Weiner, alongside other women novelists including Jodi Picoult, has drawn attention to the paucity of women reviewers and reviews of books by women in…