By Ben Brooker There is no single way to write a review. These days, a work of criticism can be anything from a 140-character tweet, to a 200-word capsule review in a newspaper, to a 10,000-word essay on a blog. Each of these formats has its own requirements for length and style. But, assuming you’ve […]

By Ben Brooker Everybody has a point of view but it takes more than just an opinion to be able to write a review that other people will want to read. Your job as a reviewer is not just to tell your readers if you thought a book, play or movie was good or bad […]

By Ben Brooker I don’t believe in giving advice to aspiring writers. I know this is a problematic way to begin a blog post in which I’ve been asked to dispense tips, but what else is one to say? Read. Lots. And write. Lots. There really is nothing else to be said. I do, however, […]

By Ben Brooker One of our recent Writers in Residence, Ben Brooker, discusses his residency. In the first two decades of the 20th century, James Joyce used one of the upstairs rooms at the now legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop on Paris’s Left Bank as his personal office. There, he wrote Ulysses, universally regarded as […]