It’s been a bad week for author-critic relations. First Alice Hoffman used Twitter to get back at a reviewer who made the mistake of not entirely loving her latest novel. Then Alain de Botton went after Caleb Crain–in the comments section of Crain’s blog–for not entirely loving his latest opus in a review for the… Continue reading »
Archives for Lit Crit
It’s Official–No More Stand-Alone Book World
The WaPo has finally announced that it will kill the stand-alone print edition of Book World and move books coverage into Outlook and Style and the arts section. No surprise there; rumors have swirled (what else do rumors do?) for weeks now. What to say? I worked at Book World a long time, and I… Continue reading »
Bolano in Academe
I have read exactly one thing by Roberto Bolano so far, and that’s the short story in the Dec. 22 issue of The New Yorker. I should probably tackle The Savage Detectives or 2666, but I don’t think I can bear to until Bolano fever dies down a little. Meanwhile, scholars have joined litbloggers in… Continue reading »
What He Said
RIP John Leonard. Lots of appreciations elsewhere to which I have nothing useful to add, except to direct you to this Nation essay from 2000, which ought to be read by all working critics and reporters and the people who edit them: I like to think of myself as having published in the New York… Continue reading »
It’s Alive! (Or, Percy’s Purple Prose)
I’ve just had the pleasure of writing about the work of Charles Robinson, a textual scholar at the University of Delaware. Working closely with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein notebooks in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Robinson has given us a new edition that strips out Percy Shelley’s edits, emendations, and “improvements.” And boy, are some of… Continue reading »
