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The Diminishing Returns of the Modern Book Review By Imran Qureshi The physical weight of a book once demanded a review of equal substance. (Photo by Suzy Hazelwood / Pexels) I remember when a book review was an event. Not a notification, not a fleeting thumbs-up, but a proper piece of writing you could sink …
Continue reading The Diminishing Returns of the Modern Book Review

I remember when a book review was a place you could linger. Not a verdict delivered in the time it takes to butter toast, but a real conversation—one that wandered, doubled back, and paused to admire a sentence that caught the light just so. The critic had room to trace a novel’s architecture, to sit …
Continue reading The Quiet Death of the Book Review: Why We Stopped Reading Closely

I remember when a book review was an event. Not a verdict squeezed into a breathless paragraph, but a slow, considered conversation between a reader, a text, and the wider world of ideas. You’d find them tucked into the back pages of literary supplements, sometimes sprawling across two or three columns, and you’d settle in …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Literary Criticism Lost Its Patience

The Vanishing Art of the Long-Form Review I remember when a book review felt like an occasion. Not a star rating, not a three-sentence blurb, but a public conversation—rigorous and respectful. I’ve been in this trade for decades, and I’ve watched that conversation fade to a murmur. The modern book review, when it appears at …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Literary Criticism Lost Its Nerve

I remember the first time I truly lost myself in a book review. It was a sprawling, 2,000-word meditation on a debut novel, tucked into the back pages of a literary magazine. The critic didn’t just tell me whether the book was good or bad; she traced the author’s influences back to obscure 19th-century diarists, …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Book Criticism Has Gotten Shorter and Lazier

I remember when a book review was something you cleared the table for. You’d unfold the Sunday paper, find the literary section, and settle into a piece that stretched across columns—paragraphs that argued, contextualised, sometimes eviscerated. The reviewer had a voice you could recognise, trust, or love to hate. Now? I open an app and …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why Literary Criticism Has Grown Short and Lazy

I still remember the first book review that stopped me cold. It wasn’t a tweet, a star rating, or a breathless “must-read” blurb. It was a long, winding essay in a defunct literary supplement—the kind of piece that didn’t just tell you whether a novel was good or bad, but wrestled with it. The critic …
Continue reading The Shrinking Review: Why We’ve Lost the Art of Literary Conversation

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

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 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