CRAIG MORGAN TEICHER poet and critic. He is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA Editions, 2021) and the editor of Little Mr. Prose Poem: The Selected Poems of Russell Edson, forthcoming from BOA Editions in October. He teaches at New York University and the Bennington Writing Seminars.
SO YOU want to write book criticism. Me too. Ever since college, when I realized that writing English papers was the best way to take ownership of a text, to imbibe the words of authors I admire and hold them living inside my imagination, I've written about books so that I might read them better. For the past two decades I've written dozens of reviews for newspapers, literary journals, magazines, and websites. Reviewing may be a poor source of income, but it is an enormously rewarding way to interact with books.
Let's assume, for the purposes of this piece, that you want to become a critic for the intrinsic value of that practice and perhaps to pay the occasional electric bill. Allow me to offer you ten pro tips for writing about books to help you on your way.
1. Trust your impressions.
This is the most important piece of advice I can give. For the purposes of your review, you, the critic, are the only lens through which your readers can view the work under consideration. Your job is to show the reader what the book looks like through your intelligent, authoritative eyes. They will make their decision about whether or not to read it based upon your review, so it is your job to furnish your most insightful and vivid impressions.
This story is from the September - October 2022 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the September - October 2022 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Literary MagNet
When Greg Marshall began writing the essays that would become his memoir, Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It (Abrams Press, June 2023), he wanted to explore growing up in Utah and what he calls \"the oddball occurrences in my oddball family.\" He says, \"I wanted to call the book Long-Term Side Effects of Accutane and pitch it as Six Feet Under meets The Wonder Years.\" But in 2014 he discovered his diagnosis of cerebral palsy, information his family had withheld from him for nearly thirty years, telling him he had \"tight tendons\" in his leg. This revelation shifted the focus of the project, which became an \"investigation into selfhood, uncovering the untold story of my body,\" says Marshall. Irreverent and playful, Leg reckons with disability, illness, queerness, and the process of understanding our families and ourselves.
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READING The Museum of Human History felt like listening to a great harmonic hum. After I finished it I found the hum lingering in my ears. Its echo continued for days.
The Sea Elephants
SHASTRI Akella's poised, elegant debut, The Sea Elephants, is a bildungsroman of a young man who joins a street theater group in India after fleeing his father's violent disapproval, the death of his twin sisters, and his mother's unfathomable grief.
The History of a Difficult Child
MIHRET Sibhat's debut novel begins with God dumping rain on a small Ethiopian town as though. He were mad at somebody.
The Sorrows of Others
AS I read each story in Ada Zhang’s brilliant collection, The Sorrows of Others, within the first few paragraphs— sometimes the first few sentences— I felt I understood the characters intimately and profoundly, such that every choice they made, no matter how radical, ill-advised, or baffling to those around them, seemed inevitable and true to me.
We Are a Haunting
TYRIEK White’s debut novel, We Are a Haunting, strikes me as both a love letter to New York City and a kind of elegy.
RADICAL ATTENTION
IN HER LATEST BOOK, THE LIGHT ROOM: ON ART AND CARE, PUBLISHED BY RIVERHEAD BOOKS IN JULY, KATE ZAMBRENO CELEBRATES THE ETHICAL WORK OF CAREGIVING, THE SMALL JOYS OF ORDINARY LIFE, AND AN ENGAGEMENT WITH THE NATURAL WORLD WITHIN HUMAN SPACES.
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