If you’re an author on Amazon, your days of posting book reviews may have come to an end. Amazon’s new book review policy classifies Amazon authors as competitors, and competitors…
Why review books? At The Awl, Jane Hu takes a historical approach to answering that question. Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing…
The Jewish Daily Forward reviews November’s Rumpus Book Club selection, Peter Orner’s Love and Shame and Love. “Part epic, part bildungsroman, Peter Orner’s “Love and Shame and Love” is a…
Book reviews sections in newspapers and magazines began shrinking a couple years ago, or being folded into other sections, even disappearing altogether. In 2007, a band of culturally dedicated authors…
Ever get sick of the stifling language that book reviewers use for their blurbs? There is indeed a “professional jargon” that is readily visible on the front and back of…
“A book arrives that in the opinion of the reviewer outrages a principle of politics or philosophy or history or art, and will lead its readers into error or illusion,…
Susan Wheeler manages to navigate a wide terrain of both content and form while maintaining the interconnectedness of one of the less lame concept albums ever produced.
To bring in the New Year, we had one helluva week at Rumpus Books. Steve Almond confronted “Katie Roiphe’s Big Cock Block,” Joshua Mohr asked why we write reviews in…
Instead of writing this book review, I’ve been pacing around my apartment and slugging absurd quantities of coffee and snarling to myself about slinging postmodern bullshit all over the page.
Good morning my fellow Rumpusians, as Christmas steadily approaches and the panic to procure becomes almost reptilian, I can honestly say I’ve never handled so many one hundred dollar bills.…
“Criticism and reviews are both meta-forms–if they don’t in some way amplify or complicate the subject of their focus, then they shouldn’t exist. So much of what passes for reviews…
Welcome to July 5th! Thanks to America, you are now missing limbs, hard of hearing, and hungover. Don’t worry. It’s still a fine day to read book reviews.