psychology dector

Unless you are the late John Leonard , the symphony-of-words book reviewer whose essays and reviews on culture and the life of the mind appeared in literally every major publication in the universe, your collection of reviews assembled in a book will probably gather dust in the remainder bin.   (To find such a bin, you would first need to find a bricks and mortar book store).   Thankfully, critic, novelist, translator and essayist Tim Parks opted to address a particular theme in his latest book, Where I’m Reading From:   The Changing World of Books (The New York Review of Books, 2015) rather than collect his voluminous, challenging, thoughtful reviews from the pages of the NYRB .   And the tome could not have arrived at a better time, seeing that a number of articles have appeared in a variety of publications recently bemoaning the loss of interest in long form journalism and essays.   Everything now must be boiled down to a Twitter post—as few characters as ...

Photo credit:  Matt Mendelsohn Lately, I’ve been reading Daniel Mendelsohn, a cultural and literary critic.   His books have ample essayistic criticism, but also personal history and metaphor.   He brings sharp, intelligent, and often witty writing that is always insightful and interesting to read. Two particularly interesting pieces I found recently, one written by Mendelsohn himself , and the other, an interview with him posted December 25 th , 2012 at Lambda Literary:   Celebrating Excellence in LGBT Literature Since 1989 , demand careful examination. “A Critic’s Manifesto” posted August 28 th , 2012 on The New Yorker website, gives us both some personal history and Mendelsohn’s view of the role of the critic.   He learned his craft, he tells us, through reading.   Mendelsohn dreamed of being not a novelist or poet, but a critic, and he began his journey on the pages of publications like The New Yorker reading not just literary critiques, but those w...

Last Sunday’s The New York Times Book Review deftly deconstructed the state of modern literary criticism . Just who is it that book reviewers write for these days? The collection of essays on the subject from a diverse group of intellectual writers takes inspiration from Alfred Kazin’s “The Function of Criticism Today,” published in the journal, Commentary , in 1960. In this space, I have reviewed a fair number of books. I love to read, and consider myself more reader than writer. It began as an escape, a way of avoiding the rage and oppression I felt at home as a child. In books, I was not me, probably the biggest attraction. I could live other lives and experience other ways of existing, and that got me to the library every two weeks for my parcel of books which I then poured through neglecting my homework and other obligations, much to the chagrin of my parents. They were powerless to stop me. When I started this blog years ago, I wanted to write about two things: my reading life ...