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"An appeal for the revival of the negative book review, then, is a remonstration against forced and foppish praise, where everything is good and so nothing at all is good." In The Baffler, Rafia Zakaria writes in praise of negative book reviews and decries the "enfeebling of literary criticism." From our archives: our own Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad book reviews.

As the world knows, letter writing is dead, killed by the popularity of email. However, before email killed letters, the telephone killed them, as did the typewriter, the telegraph and the adhesive postage stamp. (h/t Arts and Letters Daily)

Back in July, Patricia Lockwood lit up the Internet with “Rape Joke,” a harrowing poem. Now, at The Rumpus, Lauren O’Neal interviews Lockwood, who talks about “Rape Joke,” the subsequent reaction and her 2012 book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. You could also read Elisa Gabbert on Lockwood’s Twitter followers.

"Ah the world, oh the whale!"  At The Washington Times, my review of Philip Hoare's wonderful new anatomy of all things cetacean, The Whale, winner of the prestigious Samuel Johnson nonfiction prize. (ECW) michael kors outlet| toms outlet | cheap ray ban sunglasses | coach outlet | ray ban wayfarer | coach factory outlet

For the most part, Tolstoy is known as a realist, despite his work’s occasional dips into fancy. Yet the plotlines of his great novels featured long and important dream sequences. In The New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm argued that Tolstoy was a master of dreams, using Anna Karenina as proof.