Reviewing? What’s Your Motive? Next week, I’ll be leading a session on criticism — “When To Listen And What To Hear” — at Writer Unboxed’s “Un-Conference” event in Salem, Massachusetts…where they know a few things about being critical. That session and this column are not about the more extreme moments in consumer review that have… Read More
The Literary Elitism Question
As Laura Miller at Salon opens her own reflection on this, “Is the Literary World Elitist?”, she rightly explains that Eleanor Catton—responding to an instance of reader indignation at writer’s use of a 50-cents word—”treats the reader’s ire as a symptom of the creeping consumerist attitude in our response to literature.” Read More