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Born of a Bitter Bland Seed
How This Post Originally Appeared (December 3, 2003): So who is Laura Miller anyway? Here’s an audio interview* of Miller extolling the wonders of the Internet back in 1999. But, beyond her nasal...
View ArticleDave Itzkoff: The Genre Dunce Who Won’t Stop Dancing
Dave Itzkoff has been an embarrassment to the New York Times Book Review for some time, imbuing his “Across the Universe” columns with a know-nothing hubris that one expects from an investment banker...
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David Kamp, Blog Snob
Ten years from now, we’ll all be inured to David Kamp. A whole generation will have grown up as his book, The United States of Arugula, has been long forgotten — the remaining copies pulped or perhaps...
View ArticleNYTBR: Polishing the Rails
News emerged over the weekend that Dwight Garner was fleeing the New York Times Book Review for a gig as a daily books critic. With Rachel Donadio leaving the Book Review in the summer and Sam...
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RIP John Leonard
If the reviews are read, it is by those who seek a confirmation, either of their own gut reaction to a new sit-com or of a suspicion that you are a jerk. You can no more review TV according to...
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Virginia Heffernan: The Sarah Palin of Journalism
The review came over the long Thanksgiving weekend, but the 757 words that Virginia Heffernan devoted to savaging Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates on Sunday have little to do with Vowell’s book....
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The Knopf Times Book Review
[UPDATE: On the evening of January 21, 2009, I asked Tanenhaus in person about the concerns satirized below, and I was able to get a few answers. I point readers of this post to the direction of my...
View ArticleIn Which I Talk with Tanenhaus
On Wednesday night, Sam Tanenhaus and I talked. I was in the middle of arguing with my colleague Levi Asher about the future of literary coverage, saying something to him about a priori arguments in...
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Pico Iyer: A Critic Calling for the Pissboy
Pico Iyer’s anti-intellectual review in today’s New York Times Book Review begins with the sentence: “I confess, dear reader: I’ve always had a problem with William T. Vollmann.” This raises the...
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BookExpo 2014: The Future of Gender Balance and Why Conversations Need to...
It became clear on Friday morning at a BookExpo America panel devoted to “Packaging, Positioning and Reviewing in the Fiction Marketplace” that all the VIDA counting and the justifiable grandstanding...
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