Month:June 2026

The Disappearing Art of the Book Review I miss the old book review. Not as a relic, but as a small, contained event. You’d open the weekend paper, or a thick literary journal, and there it was—a piece that treated a book as something worth real intellectual time. The reviewer had plainly done the work. …
Continue reading The Shrinking of the Critical Eye: Why Book Reviews Have Gotten Shorter and Lazier

There was a stretch, not so long ago, when a book review felt like a minor event. Not a buyer’s guide or a quick thumbs-up, but an actual conversation—one mind turning over another’s work with patience and a little bit of nerve. I still remember reading a John Updike review in The New Yorker that …
Continue reading The Slow Disappearance of the Thoughtful Review

A book review used to be an occasion. I’m not talking about the distant past—just a couple of decades back, when picking up the Times Literary Supplement or a weighty literary quarterly meant you were about to spend half an hour inside someone else’s mind. Not to find out if a book was “good” or …
Continue reading The Quiet Collapse of the Book Review: Why Criticism Has Gotten Shorter and Lazier

I remember when a book review felt like a letter from a friend who had all afternoon to talk. Not rushed. Not trying to sell you anything. It showed up in the back pages of a literary quarterly or nestled into the weekend paper, sometimes running two thousand words, sometimes more. You got the sense …
Continue reading Why Book Reviews Have Gotten Shorter and Lazier

I can still recall when a book review felt less like a transaction and more like a small ceremony. Sunday mornings, the supplement section still carrying that faint chemical tang of fresh print—I’d sink into a piece that treated a novel not as a product to be scored but as a country to be wandered …
Continue reading The Shrinking Life of the Modern Book Review

I remember when a book review was an occasion. A carefully built piece of prose—a three-way conversation between the reviewer, the author, and whoever was holding the page. You’d find them in the fat Sunday supplements, or in literary journals that smelled of ink and time. Miniature essays, sometimes 2,000 words or more, where the …
Continue reading The Fading Art: Why Book Reviews Have Gotten Shorter and Lazier

The Vanishing Art of the Thoughtful Book Review I still remember the first time a review truly rattled me. Not the book—the review. Three thin paragraphs, a plot summary going through the motions, a rating out of five, and a closing line I swear I’d read on a dozen other blogs. The writer had definitely …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Literary Criticism Has Become So Brief and Indifferent

I still remember the first book review that truly unsettled me. Not because the critic panned a novel I loved—that happens often enough—but because of the strange, hollow feeling I had when I finished it. The review was barely three paragraphs long. It told me the plot in two sentences, called the prose “luminous,” and …
Continue reading The Vanishing Art of the Long-Form Book Review