“Postcolonial literary criticism” has never quite settled into a stable object of study. The phrase points less to a single method than to a set of questions about how empire, language, and the material circulation of books shape what counts as literature. Adjacent terms—anticolonial reading, world literature, comparatism, decolonial theory—overlap with it without being interchangeable. …
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Month:August 2026
Why Poetry Sales Are Growing While Fiction Stagnates
Poetry sales are growing while fiction stagnates — that sentence, repeated often enough, has become a small genre of its own in publishing commentary. The claim deserves closer inspection, not because it is false, but because the material conditions behind it are more interesting than the headline suggests. Poetry, long treated as the most marginal …
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How Social Media Changed the Book Launch Forever
For most of the twentieth century, a book launch was a physical event with a fixed geography: a bookstore, a library, a publisher’s office, a hotel ballroom. It had a date, a guest list, a table of canapés, and a local newspaper photographer if the author was fortunate. The launch was not merely promotional. It …
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Why Book Reviews Have Gotten Shorter and Lazier
The modern book review is shrinking. Not just in ambition, but in word count, analytical range, and the willingness to sit with a text long enough to say something true about it. The long-form literary essay—once a staple of quarterlies, Sunday supplements, and serious magazines—has been pushed aside by the 400-word notice, the star rating, …
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The Persistent Problem of Representation in Publishing
The problem of representation in publishing is not a single failure but a structural condition. It names the gap between who writes, who edits, who acquires, who reviews, and who is imagined as a reader. In book history and the cultural sociology of reading, representation is not only a matter of demographic counting. It is …
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The Shrinking Review: How Market Logic Starved Literary Criticism
Book reviews used to be a place where a critic could stretch out, build a case, and let an argument breathe across several thousand words. That space has collapsed. What was once a sustained intellectual encounter—a review that situated a text within literary tradition, material history, and the critic’s own sensibility—has been squeezed into the …
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The Title as Argument: What a Book Calls Itself and Why That Matters
There comes a point in any serious reader’s life when a book’s title stops being a label and starts doing something more exigent. It becomes a thesis statement, a formal provocation, a contract between author and reader that takes effect before the first sentence. The title is the book’s first utterance—not spoken by the narrator …
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