Lit Crit

What is the worst book you’ve ever read?

Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic and author Michael Dirda held an epic “Ask Me Anything” interview at Reddit, fielding questions online from readers about self-publishing, Amazon and the worst books he ever reviewed.

At one point, he talked about the worst book he’d ever read. Check it out: “Judith Krantz‘s Dazzle. Even the sex in the book was boilerplate, a totally meretricious work. John Sutherland–a distinguished English authority on the novel and the best seller–once included Dazzle in his list of the 25 worst novels of the century.”

Read more

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

The New Yorker has relaunched its literary blog with a new name and logo: Page-Turner.

The new blog will expand the work of the Book Bench, the magazine’s old books site. “Daily essays will be the blog’s mainstay, with books as an anchor for wide-ranging cultural comment,” explained the introductory post.

Check it out: “Our first day features an essay by Salman Rushdie on the spectre of censorship; a dissenting view on the immortality of “Death of a Salesman,” by Giles Harvey; Mary Norris on the subtle marvellousness of the medieval thorn; and Nick Thompson on the risks of the running life. Check back for interviews with fiction writers, staff reading lists, literary Shouts & Murmurs, cool-headed rants, barely checked enthusiasms, good-natured persiflage, and, with luck, lots of soft owls flying over the lane.”

Over at Commentary, you can find a list of the American writers ranked by the amount of scholarly writing they have generated over the last 25 years. Henry James leads the list–scholars have written 3,188 pieces about his work.

Many of these writers have free eBooks available online. We’ve created a list below linking to free digital book editions of works by these writers.

Here’s more about the list: “Over the past 25 years, Henry James has been the top-ranked American writer, according to the latest MLA International Bibliography. More than 3,000 pieces of scholarship have been devoted to him in whole or part since 1987 … Here are the top American writers as determined by the amount of scholarship on each. In brackets is the rise or fall of each writer when compared to his or her ranking since 1947.”

Read more

Paranormal author Jami Gold asked her readers: When Does Fan Fiction Cross an Ethical Line? Her pointed question generated more than 220 comments about Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotica novel by E L James that began as Twilight fan fiction and landed a seven-figure advance.

Gold had no disrespect for the art of writing fan fiction–she honed her craft by writing Harry Potter fan fiction.

Fifty Shades of Grey is about a young woman named Anastasia Steele meeting a man named Christian Grey; Twilight is about a young woman named Bella Swan meeting a vampire named Edward Cullen.  At Gold’s blog, a few readers listed plot similarities between the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Grey. We’ve linked to a few examples below–what do you think?

Read more

Today Slate launched a monthly feature, the Slate Book Review. The New York Times has more details.

Check it out: “The first weekend of every month, the Slate Book Review will take over Slate’s home page, delivering reviews of the newest fiction and nonfiction; essays on reading, writing, and the great (and terrible) books of years gone by; author interviews; videos and podcasts; and much more. We’re proud to bring together Slatesters whose work you know and love with great new writers who’ve never appeared in our magazine before, all in one smart, essential package.”

As of this writing, you can read Allison Benedikt on What To Expect When You’re Expecting and Wesley Morris on “a poet’s investigation of blackness in American culture.”

Last night Adam Mars-Jones won the Hatchet Job of the Year award, celebrated for writing the “angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review published in a newspaper or magazine in 2011.”

Follow this link to read Mars-Jones’ scathing review of By Nightfall that earned a golden hatchet and “a year’s supply of potted shrimp.” British journalists Rachel Johnson, Suzi Feay, Sam Leith and D.J. Taylor judged the competition. At this link, you can read all the shortlisted Hatchet Job of the Year reviews.

Leith explained why they chose the review: “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”

 

Do negative reviews stop people from reading your books? Over at her blog, novelist Shiloh Walker disputed that claim in a passionate essay.

Check it out: “That negative review isn’t going to kill your career. Will it stop a few people from buying your book? Possibly–because that book may not be right for them. And FYI, one of the rants lately was that negative reviews discouraged people from reading … readers aren’t discouraged by ‘bad’ reviews. And guess what–that negative review may be the very thing that entices another reader to buy your book.”

We were so inspired by her post that we checked negative reviews of ten authors at Amazon–follow the links below to the many one-star reviews received by bestselling authors. Twilight topped the list with 669 one-star reviews. Read this list before you complain about your next bad review.

Read more

Firebrand Technologies founder Fran Toolan tweeted a big statistic about his company’s digital book review service today: “over 45,000 reviews were generated in 2011 from reviewers using NetGalley. A 500% increase over 2010.”

NetGalley has opened the door for bloggers, librarians, and other readers to apply for review copies from major publishers. However, not all review requests get approved.

NetGalley has assembled a a practical What Are Publishers Looking For? page to maximize your chances of getting your NetGalley request approved. The guide reveals what individual publishers expect for review requests–follow this link to explore the page.

Novelist Jennifer Weiner has made a count of men and women reviewed by the New York Times last year.

Overall, Weiner (pictured, via)  found that out of 254 fiction reviews, nearly 60 percent of the featured books were written by men. Her long essay also counted authors reviewed multiple times by the newspaper. Follow this link to read the whole report.

Check it out: “Finally, of the works of fiction whose authors were reviewed twice (either with two full reviews, or review plus roundup) and profiled, one was a woman and ten were men. The men who received two reviews plus a profile were David Foster Wallace, Albert Brooks, Julian Barnes, Kevin Wilson, Nicholson Baker, Tom Perrotta, Russell Banks, Jeffrey Eugenides, Haruki Murakami and Allan Hollinghurst. The only woman who received two reviews plus a profile was Tea Obreht.”

Read more

After 30 years at the newspaper, movie critic and author J. Hoberman has been cut at the Village Voice.

Most recently, the critic published An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War at New Press.

Daily Intel had a quote from Hoberman: “I would be disingenuous to say I hadn’t considered the possibility that this would happen to me eventually … I was shocked, but not surprised.” (Via Mediabistro Newsfeed)