Month:June 2026

There was a time when a book review felt like an occasion. You’d unfold the Sunday paper, settle in with a coffee, and find yourself drawn into a sprawling, argumentative essay that took the book seriously—not just as a product, but as a piece of thought worth wrestling with. The reviewer didn’t merely tell you …
Continue reading The Vanishing Art of the Long-Form Book Review

Not so long ago, a book review was a kind of conversation—low, earnest, the sort you might have in a dim room with the novel still warm in your hands. You’d finish the last paragraph and want to argue with it, or rush to the bookstore to see for yourself. That urgency has mostly gone. …
Continue reading The Quiet Decline of the Book Review: Why We Stopped Wrestling with the Page

I remember when a book review was something you’d sit down with—maybe over a second cup of coffee—and actually read. Not scan. Not scroll. Read. The critic would pull apart a novel’s architecture, argue with its ideas, and sometimes spend more words on a single chapter than most reviews now spend on entire trilogies. That …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Book Criticism Has Gotten Short and Shallow

There was a time when a book review felt like an event. It showed up in the Sunday paper or a quarterly with a name like The Kenyon Review or Partisan Review, and it asked for a quiet hour, a cup of coffee, maybe a sharp pencil for the margins. I can still feel the …
Continue reading The Fading Art of the Long-Form Book Review: Why Criticism Has Grown Short and Lazy

I can still see the morning I first felt the shift. Tuesday, the study thick with coffee and the vanilla-tinged dust of old paper. I had a literary supplement from twelve years back open on the desk—a review that rambled across two full pages, slow and stubborn, quoting long stretches of prose, picking fights with …
Continue reading The Gradual Disappearance of the Long-Form Review: Why Book Criticism Has Shrunk and Lost Its Nerve

I remember when a book review felt like an occasion. You’d open the weekend paper—or one of those thick literary quarterlies that smelled of ink and ambition—and there it was: two, three, sometimes four thousand words wrestling with a single title. The reviewer hadn’t just read the book. They’d lived inside it, argued with it, …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Book Criticism Has Gotten Shorter and Sloppier

I remember the first time I held a book review that felt like a meal. It was in the back pages of a now-defunct literary magazine, a sprawling 2,000-word dissection of a debut novel that had barely made a ripple in the market. The critic didn’t just tell me whether the book was good or …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Literary Criticism Has Gotten Shorter and Lazier

I still remember the first time a book review genuinely threw me off balance. Not because the critic had missed the point of the novel, or because they’d praised something I found flat. The review itself was the problem: three short paragraphs, mostly plot summary, capped with a verdict delivered with the shrug of a …
Continue reading Where Did the Long Book Review Go?

The book review used to be a stately, spacious form. You could settle into it the way you’d settle into a favorite armchair, expecting a considered, layered response to a work of literature. What you often get now is something stream­lined to the point of breathlessness—a sprint of opinion that’s over before you’ve had time …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Our Literary Conversations Have Grown Quiet

Not that long ago, a proper book review felt like a conversation in a quiet room. It had patience. A certain gravity. The writer could circle a work, test its weight, wonder aloud about its intentions and its shortcomings. I miss that. I miss the review that was willing to be wrong, to be slow, …
Continue reading The Slow Fade of the Thoughtful Review: Why Literary Criticism Keeps Shrinking—and Growing Shallower