Mr. Tanenhaus, while we profoundly disagree on a number of points, I must echo the sentiments of my colleague. Your concerns, interests, and curiosity are…
On Wednesday night, Sam Tanenhaus and I talked. I was in the middle of arguing with my colleague Levi Asher about the future of literary…
I am especially surprised to see that this week’s edition of the New York Times Book Review has a lot of good material. I don’t…
[UPDATE: On the evening of January 21, 2009, I asked Tanenhaus in person about the concerns satirized below, and I was able to get a...
The review came over the long Thanksgiving weekend, but the 757 words that Virginia Heffernan devoted to savaging Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates on Sunday…
News emerged over the weekend that Dwight Garner was fleeing the New York Times Book Review for a gig as a daily books critic. With…
Sam: Very tepid on your blog. Not hot at all. Am told the men caught another snake nuzzling into Keller’s neck and that the snake…
Ten years from now, we’ll all be inured to David Kamp. A whole generation will have grown up as his book, The United States of…
Andrew Wheeler: “Blowing off half a year and then not doing the reading is what a layabout does at a minor state college, not the…
It appears that Sam Tanenhaus will be expanding his editing duties to the Week in Review section, which he will also be editing. Apparently, one…
I am absolutely stunned to see this week’s edition of The New York Times Book Review contain not one, but TWO, pieces devoted to comics:…
If there are four words that best describe the NYTBR‘s Top Ten Books of 2007, they are: We Take No Chances.
Languagehat unearths a hilarious online expose involving Sam Tanenhaus’s failure to dictate to the masses. It seems that Tanenhaus attempted to strong-arm his readership into…
Josh Glenn has a comparative roundup and Siegel’s offending review can be found here. No brownies for you, Tanenhaus! And, man, it seems like you…
Since Faust was a tragic play, an opera, and a film, how can Schlesinger “paint” his defection as Faustian? Sure, Goethe was an occasional painter,…
It appears that the NYTBR podcast has shifted to a kinder, gentler opening tune — which is to say opening music that as safe as…
Have you heard the latest from Sam Tanenhaus’s dismal literary tabloid? Writers should be pilloried for writing the sentence “Men are rats.” It’s an absolute…
To read Jim Lewis’s review of Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is to enter an overvalued campanile of stupidity, amateurish insight, half-baked conclusions, and insufferable…
This week’s New York Times Book Review includes a potentially promising meditation on ideology by Stephen Metcalf, who writes about a recent essay anthology, Why…
The first dirty little secret of writing a review for Sam Tanenhaus is to come across like an ill-informed wanker who knows nothing of the…
Litkicks: “Rachel Donadio’s articles have no point of view. I’ve read at least ten of her essays or interviews in this publication in the last…
There are indeed people in New York who are interested in William T. Vollmann. On Thursday night, accompanied by Marydell, Levi, and Jason, I attended…
I’m with Orthofer. How precisely does John Irving’s “Give my buddy Gunter a chance” piece tell us anything about Peeling the Onion? By this sleazy…
Why aren’t there more white collar critics? Or, more specifically, why aren’t there more snobs who believe they’re championing blue collar critics when they have…
Erica Wagner, whose first name is Erica and whose last name is Wagner, displays needless padding in the third paragraph, which comes before the fourth…
Dwight Garner, newly minted blogger of The New York Times Book Review, apparently has few new ideas on how to blog and is now content…
Who knew that actor James Woods was now contributing pieces to the New York Times Book Review?
While it’s good to see the ever reliable Liesl Schillinger offer a quirky and personal take on the new Clive James book, Schillinger’s pleasant review…
Sam Tanenhaus: “[I]f you can put a paperback original first novel on the cover, that is like orgasm time for us.”