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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

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