Monthly archive - January 2020

Why is literary Twitter piling on Jeanine Cummins' American Dirt, once one of the most highly anticipated books of the year? After an intense bidding war among nine houses that ended in a reported seven-figure deal, the novel landed on both the New York Times' and LitHub's 2020-in-reading lists.  Read more

"Anyone can be a critic." It's a common lament these days now that the book review landscape is changing. English professors and book reviewers in newspapers aren't the only tastemakers in literary criticism anymore: Goodreads community members, anonymous or top reviewers on Amazon, and dedicated bloggers can, and do, produce discourse about books. But are they really critics?  Read more

In his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner famously wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

For the first time since 2011, when Borders shut down, or 2007, when Amazon launched the Kindle, or maybe 1455, when Johannes Gutenberg went bankrupt immediately upon printing his game-changing best seller The Bible, the news about book publishing has seemed less than dire.  Read more