"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."
~ Samuel Johnson

"My idea of pure heaven is to spend a day in the kitchen, peeling, chopping, and stirring while the words of a good book fill the air around me."
~Ruth Reichl

"I would rather be attacked than unnoticed."
~ Samuel Johnson

"Everyone should be on Facebook. Facebook isn’t competing with Twitter. Facebook is competing with the Internet. If you’re a journalist, you want to be part of the conversation."
~ Sree Srinivasan, in a lecture to the National Book Critics Circle, in which he also said Facebooks is "one of the greatest time sinks in human history"

"Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one."
~ Malcolm Forbes

"Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has any right to whine. He is not obliged to be an author. he invited publicity, and he must take the publicity as it comes along."
~ E.M. Forster

"Anyone can be accurate and even profound, but it is damned hard work to make criticism charming."
~ H.L. Mencken

"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs."
~ John Osborne

Quick Links

Find Authors

Book news, reviews, and interviews

Plus blogs, links to author interviews, resources for critics and book reviewers


With some periodicals, you may have to register to view the publication online (usually for free, especially for book reviews). They want the demographic information so they know where (and how old) their readers are and thus to whom their (dreamed-of) online advertisers will be able to market their wares.

The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered. Clive James' classic poem about about literary schadenfreude, as posted by Dwight Garner on the NY Times Paper Cuts blog about books.

Book reviewing panel. C-Span video of 2010 Virginia Festival of the Book panel discussion of the business of book reviews, with panelists Ron Charles, deputy editor of Washington Post Book World, David Montgomery, thriller and mystery Critic for the Daily Beast and Chicago Sun-Times, and authors Rebecca Skloot and Katharine Weber.

Book Review Podcasts. Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, talks each week to authors, editors, and critics about new books, the literary scene, and current best sellers. The downloadable audio files are in mp3 format.

Curled Up With a Good Book. (LL writes: "highly entrepreneurial e-zine; reviewers work for free and do a good job (on the six reviews I've read so far")

Historian Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages for fake reviews on Amazon (Alexandra Topping, Guardian, 7-16-10). Historian to pay damages and costs to two rivals who launched a libel case after he posted reviews "praising his own work and rubbishing that of his rivals."

Kirkus Reviews lives on. Motoko Rich reports that Kirkus Gets A New Owner — From The NBA (NY Times 2-10-10). In December he'd reported that End of Kirkus Reviews Brings Anguish and Relief (NYTimes, 12-11-09). Starred reviews were rare; negative reviews were not. Here's the link to the old Kirkus Reviews

100 Great American Novels You've (Probably) Never Read (the book) by Karl Bridges. This pricey hardcover book is "a resource for readers of American fiction who’ve read their way through the standard canon of classics. 'One goal of this book,' Bridges writes in his Introduction, 'is to represent a wide time span–one equaling the length of American history.'' The novels listed cover a full 200 years: from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker(1797) to Charles T. Power’s In the Memory of the Forest (1997). You can find a list of the 100 novels on Neglected Books.


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