Reviews
Small Press Books Worth Your Shelf Space
Why the titles big retailers overlook are often the ones that stay on the shelf longest — and how to find them.
Reviews: Tested and Rated
Reviews written after finishing the book, quoting enough to let a reader argue back. Each verdict states the ambition, assesses the execution, and places the title beside the work it descends from. Fiction, nonfiction and reissues all covered. For readers who want criticism with a position.
Reviews written after finishing the book, quoting enough to let a reader argue back. Each verdict states the ambition, assesses the execution, and places the title beside the work it descends from. Fiction, nonfiction and reissues all covered. For readers who want criticism with a position.
Reviews
How to Write a Book Review — The Unfinished Sentence: How to Review a Book You Didn't Finish
A DNF review can be the most honest criticism you write. It can also be the laziest. Here is how to tell the difference.
Reviews
Audiobook Review Guide — The Voice in the Room: How to Review an Audiobook as Its Own Medium
Narration is not packaging. It is a second authorship, and it deserves its own critical standards.
Reviews
Books, Beer and a Pop-Up Register: Anthem Books Throws Its Banned Books Party in Morristown
A free party at a brewery on Oct. 8 doubles as a fundraiser for the American Library Association's anti-censorship campaign — and a small bookstore's bid to matter locally.
Reviews
Book Blurbs — The Blurb Economy: Who Writes Jacket Praise and Why It Matters
The quotes on a book jacket are a small economy of favors. Who writes blurbs, what the ask costs famous writers, and how to read praise with an editor's eye.
Reviews
Weight and Light: Print vs Digital Books, and What Each Format Actually Gives You
Durability, resale, focus, and retention are the four places where the formats genuinely differ — and the differences are practical, not romantic.
Reviews
The Manufactured Star: How Trade Reviews Decide Which Books Get Noticed
Before a single reader opens it, a book's fate is set by an anonymous trade apparatus of galleys, deadlines, and undisclosed rubrics — and the star on the jacket is a passport, not a verdict.
Reviews
Four Englishes: Choosing a Translation of Crime and Punishment
Constance Garnett, David McDuff, Pevear & Volokhonsky, and Oliver Ready make four different novels out of Crime and Punishment; a practical guide to choosing among them.
Reviews
The Built Room: A Room of One's Own as Argument
Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) argues a room into being; a rereading of the essay as the century's most complete work of literary criticism.
Reviews
The Kept Hours: The Remains of the Day and the Butler's Voice
Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), Booker Prize winner and the heart of his Nobel citation, reread as an audit of dignity narrated by its defendant.