The best new book reviews on the Interwebs (as chosen by Tom Lutz, founder and editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books) are about debating The Great Gatsby, growing up with Black Panthers, and hating on Tao Lin.
And Lutz says the taboo in our Q&A:
“The novels and book reviews I respond to remind me — not explicitly, of course, or obnoxiously — that the writer is smarter, or more adroit, or more knowledgeable, or more skillful (or all of those things) than I am.”
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Critical Hit Awards
Slate’s Dan Kois picks his winners in the latest edition of the Critical Hit Awards.
Electric Literature: If your reviews carried no identifying marks—no Slate logo, no byline—would a reader be able to guess that they came from the Slate Book Review? Should they be able to?
Dan Kois: Every review I edit contains hidden within its text the name of my daughter, Nina.
Electric Literature: ‘Critical Hit Awards’ is really just an anagram for ‘Rad Satirical Witch’. What kind of editorial balance do you try to bring to the Slate Book Review overall? Balance between what and what?
Dan Kois: I’m looking to achieve a balance between old and new books; books from big houses and books from small ones; traditional reviewy reviews and critical essays that use the book as a diving board. And I want a balance of fun books and serious books and great books and not-so-great books.
Electric Literature: You have reviewed books, movies, graphic novels, and music. There’s a guy at The Awl who reviews the weather and a guy at The Rumpus who reviews the world. Is there anything that can’t be reviewed? Anything that you would not review?
Dan Kois: I imagine anything can be reviewed. When was the last time your fellow human beings didn’t have an opinion about something?
Read the full Q&A and check out Dan’s winners here.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Critical Hit Awards, Dan Kois
Book reviews [...] should ideally be able to stand alone. You should want to re-read a good book review, as you would a short story.
So says Nicole Cliffe, Books Editor at The Hairpin and this month’s judge for the Critical Hit Awards.
You can read (and re-read) all of Nicole’s winners here.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Critical Hit Awards, Nicole Cliffe
Our guest judge this month is Daniel Levin Becker, reviews editor at The Believer and author of Many Subtle Channels. We asked him about optimism, Oulipian constraints, and the best time of day to read a book review.
Electric Literature: What makes a good book review?
Daniel Levin Becker: A good book review, according to the only really universal criterion I have, starts a conversation―one that ideally has as much to say as someone who’s read the book already as it does to someone who hasn’t heard of it, or for that matter who hasn’t read a book since high school. A good book review also stays rooted in the world, rather than beginning and ending within the book, though not so much so that it forgets to engage with what the author is doing.
- Fiction Advocate
Filed under Critical Hit Awards, Daniel Levin Becker, The Believer
We brought in an expert — M. Rebekah Otto, Books Editor at The Rumpus — to select this month’s best reviews.
As Parul Senghal pointed out in her excellent review of Ellen Ullman’s By Blood, the triangle is the “essential scaffolding” of literature. I would say the same is true of the great book review. A book review is a comfortable triad: author, reviewer, reader. There is structural integrity to this arrangement. Some reviews, of course, benefit one party more than another. And though we hate to admit it, reviews can sometimes be a self-serving exercise, serving the reviewer more than anyone else. A young writer can build his name by writing reviews, maybe before he has anything substantial to discuss. A well-received review of a high-profile book can cement a reputation. And of course, the review could just be a cloak for another argument the reviewer wants to make. Most reviews are not of this ilk, and just because something is self-serving doesn’t make it bad. The following reviews manifests the triangulation of a great book review.
- Fiction Advocate
Filed under Critical Hit Awards
Every book is a book review. By imitating and innovating on what came before, any book is an implicit critique of its predecessors.
The reverse is not necessarily true: not every book review is a book. But this month our winning book reviews almost feel long enough to fill a tome. Reviewing such big personalities as Rachel Maddow, Salman Rushdie, and David Foster Wallace, and tackling such weighty subjects as American warmongering, Islamic fundamentalism, and the fate of literature in a televisual age, they could easily grow unwieldy. But given the circumstances our winners remain remarkably concise.
Click here to see the latest winners.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Critical Hit Awards
Critics don’t change their minds; they simply refine their opinions.
Reappraisals are everywhere this month, as new releases by Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz and Martin Amis invite us to take a fresh look at well-known authors. In the first sign that the fall books season has arrived, Michiko Kakutani was spotted performing the elaborate giveth-and-taketh routine that is typical of her species, exalting Zadie Smith’s first novel in order to more authoritatively savage the new one. Even Don DeLillo, with nothing new to release, is being reevaluated in light of the movie adaptation of his “lesser” novel Cosmopolis.
As if they sensed this change in the weather, the Critical Hit Award winners for September are all reappraisals―of a famous author, a forgotten body of work, and a centuries-old genre.
See this month’s winners here.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under book review, books, Critical Hit Awards
A recent article by Jacob Silverman in Slate alleged that book reviews have become too nice, too full of “personal esteem and mutual reinforcement” at the expense of cold hard criticism. His idea was echoed by Dwight Garner at The New York Times Magazine, who called for more “excellent and authoritative and punishing critics—perceptive enough to single out the voices that matter for legitimate praise, abusive enough to remind us that not everyone gets, or deserves, a gold star.”
Personally, I think smart readers are always skeptical of nice reviews. Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook may be turning into a “mutual admiration society,” as Silverman says, but we all know that criticism has teeth, and we recognize the best of it when we smell blood. This month’s winners are a reminder that here at the Critical Hit Awards, we sometimes like it rough.
Click here to see the winners.
- Brian Hurley
Filed under Critical Hit Awards
