Where is the best place to find decent literary criticism, outside of a university library?

JtN gave away a load of critical works last year, but I don't think they can be found now, outside my shelves, or a vast dustbin somewhere. That was not outside of a university library, though, it was outside of a charity shop I think.

i'm sure there must be something like that in big ol london.

this weeks sunday book review is a sort of 'state of literary criticsm' today...

working my way through the essays in the print verz im p underwhelmed, not sure anyone makes much of a case for anything, really, feel like that simpsons gag where ppl are picketing the white house w/ signs that say 'everything's fine' & shit

are we in the clinton's 2nd term of literature atm? hmmmm

so basically criticism doesnt matter

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/books/review/Roiphe-t-web.html?ref=books&pagewanted=all

this one really sticks in my craw

working my way through the essays in the print verz im p underwhelmed

Yeah. If that omnibus represents the state of criticism, let it die.

Here's another one.

To those who doubt the beleaguered but well-spoken critic’s influence, his ability to provoke or sway, I would submit a tiny piece of anecdotal evidence from the classroom. I have seen students rush out to buy “Anna Karenina” because an essay by James Wood made them feel that Tolstoy was essential. If it’s even just these couple of students, alone on planet Earth, who have read that essay and rushed out, those couple of students are to me sufficient proof of the robustness and purpose of the eloquent critic, of his power to awake and enlighten, of his absolutely crucial place in our world.

only a few people bought the VU album but each and every one of them etc. etc.

oh the ironing that an essay extolling the values of style is itself so functionally written etc. etc.

oy, i don't think i can stand to read all of that online. should have seen it yesterday!

just looked at elif batuman's, she appear to be on autopilot

+s

katie roiphe's the one who wrote that other essay abt how all male authors these days are pussies right

Beauty is surely the defining property of literature — but what can criticism do with it? Doesn’t it invariably leave beauty to one side like a pile of indigestible fibers?

this is kind of a revolting metaphor when you think about it

the title makes me want to post one of those pictures of girls in scarves hugging books and chatting outside a library from every university website ever

But where does it leave the serious critic, one not interested, say, in tabulating the number of “Brooklyn novelists” who receive attention each year in publications like this one (data possibly more useful to real estate agents and sociologists than to readers)?

inter-office rivalry there huh

a bit late, but I blogged on the NYT thing...
(well, the half of it that I read, anyway)

http://givefascistshell.wordpress.com/2011/01/12/hittin-licks-was-the-only-thing-i-knew-besides-grindin/

just read this
http://www.thenation.com/article/trillings-sandbags-lionel-trillings-critical-essays

I find myself with a thought that may be an old one.

There should be more books about writers (and their books) that are not academic books.

I was thinking about Jonathan Coe (as discussed by poster Tatum) and thinking, leaving aside one's view of Coe's cruise control etc, still he's written a load of books, someone could write something connected about them.

But there is no way such a book would happen outside academic publishing (and it would be quite rare even there).

The point isn't Coe, but any writer with a substantial oeuvre. Kate Atkinson. Zadie Smith. Alan Hollinghurst. You might get a biography of such a writer one day. You'll never get a free-ranging book about what they've written.

Books that I can imagine, but won't exist:

Conversations with Books: reading Sally Rooney, by Nicole Flattery

NW of Here: a study of Zadie Smith, by Ash Sarkar

Where Is Here: a year reading Joyce Carol Oates, by Patricia Lockwood

Brooklyn Dodger: assessing Jonathan Lethem, by Marco Roth

Lines of Beauty: the value of Alan Hollinghurst, by Adam Mars-Jones

Very Twentieth-Century: surviving Martin Amis, by Christopher Tayler

Backhand: why I love Geoff Dyer, by Zadie Smith

Why can't we have such books? I suppose the answer is: our culture doesn't value literature enough.

There is a lot of talk about reading, but strangely it seems little appetite for a book by a good writer about reading another interesting writer.

And yet ... Rooney, for instance, is such a big seller, wouldn't a sympathetic study of her work (maybe written in 20% memoir form itself - 'I remember the day I first read Sally Rooney. I was travelling to the funeral of my aunt in Limerick, and as I arrived at Stansted I realised I had nothing for the plane') actually sell quite well and become a fairly iconic book for a lot of 20-something readers?

I've never really watched any of them, because I prefer to read stuff rather than watch videos of people talking, but isn't there a whole subculture of people making videos about books they've read on youtube and tiktok? I know there are incredibly long videos online analysing movies and tv shows, do people on literature youtube/tiktok do a similar thing, or is it a different vibe? Maybe there could be a revival in written lit crit if you get booktok influencers to start publishing it?

U&I, by Nicholson Baker about John Updike, is a rewarding example of the genre. I suppose the "critical biography" now occupies this space.

But there aren't biographies of living writers, are there?

The one writer who seems to have managed this is DFW - who, being dead, did actually get biographical and critical (?) non-academic (?) books (even films) about him.

But why not a whole book about DFW's work (assuming anyone still thinks it any good) by Smith, or Franzen, or Ben Marcus?

Maybe another, surreptitious reason this doesn't happen is: writers' egos doesn't let them write at length about other living writers.

I agree that U&I could be a model, though it's more on the memoir / narrative side and, as I recall, mostly not much about Updike's actual work.

This series may be the closest currently to what I suggest, though all the subjects are dead:

https://press.princeton.edu/series/writers-on-writers