Short Reviews of Forthcoming and Recently Published Books with an Emphasis on Wide Reach and Dopeness-of-Text
Back in the mid 2010’s I stumbled upon a blog titled Conversational Reading by Veronica Esposito. That blog is how I got pretty much all of my reading recommendations. It was so well curated and totally independent from the pressures of the publishing world and the market. It avoided the pitfalls of listacularism (definition: the ideology associated with the production of listicles). It’s been inactive for a long time now (here is a taste of the style via a "year in reading" article from The Millions, when Veronica went by a different name). I also don’t feel embarrassed to say that many of these books were life-changing.
Given what has happened recently in the criticism landscape, with the closure of Bookforum mainly, I figured that now would be a good time to try and expand my own coverage of book releases, and the discourse surrounding those releases. Kind of attempt to do what Veronica was doing, in a way. My most lofty ambition in starting this blog is attempting to forecast a future canon (of sorts). What I know I can do at minimum is write brief, interesting micro-reviews (but sometimes longer) of recently released and forthcoming titles. I hope to contribute in a small way to what I fear will be a big gap in coverage of and criticism about interesting titles from smaller presses. (although these write-ups won’t all be positive, and they won’t all necessarily cover smaller press books!)
Starting up this blog is a separate venture from my work as founding editor and publisher of the Cleveland Review of Books. Our commitment there is to put out meticulously edited and ridiculously in-depth criticism without paying too much attention to when books come out. We eschew following the calendar of the publishing industry for its own sake, although we do often do so. This blog is about touching as many bases as possible and staying a step ahead of the cycle without diluting my ability to say at least something interesting about everything I write about. I also view this as an ongoing practice, a way to work on my writing in a low pressure way that hopefully also serves a function within the critical landscape.
