Critical Notes

Are book critics too mean? Should authors at the receiving end of a negative review stop biting their tongues and respond? Arthur Krystal considers the matter in the Chronicle of

What obligations do reviewers have to self-published books? Joseph Peschel talks to a variety of critics and authors for “Another 100,000 Galleys” at the Los Angeles Review of Books. New

Last Thursday’s National Book Critics Circle awards attracted plenty of coverage, including reports from the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, and other outlets. At Commentary’s website,

Last week the nonprofit organization VIDA released its report on the gender gap at literary magazines: With one exception (Granta), coverage at the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Paris Review, and

The appreciations for Barney Rosset, who died last week, rolled in over the weekend from the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

Adam Kirsch reviews Nathan Englander’s story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank at Tablet; Parul Sehgal reviews the book for NPR.org. George de Stefano reviews

Laura Collins-Hughes reviews Lysley Tenorio’s debut story collection, Monstress, for the Boston Globe. Steve Weinberg reviews Keija Parssinen’s novel The Ruins of Us for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. David Duhr

Last Friday Bethanne Patrick discussed the NBCC award nominees with board member Carolyn Kellogg and Balakian awardee Ron Charles for Follow the Reader, a weekly book chat on Twitter. You

Last Saturday the NBCC announced the finalists for its book awards. Here at Critical Mass, you can see the full list of finalists in all six book categories, as well