Accent on book reviews

For the past five years, I’ve been writing book reviews for the local newspaper, at a rate of about two per month. I got a ton of free books from the gig and I find that writing brief (550 word) articles is good training for editing. If I wanted to add a sentence to a review, I had to take one away, and I got very proficient at trimming excess verbiage.

Alas, the supplement that contains reviews and entertainment listings is losing money. The book section survived the first round of editorial trimming, but not the second.

However, a new forum for my reviews fell into my lap at just the right time. I am a member of the charter editorial board of the new online literary review forum Accent, which went live a couple of hours ago. I have five or six reviews in the inaugural issue. Check it out!

In the next issue I should have reviews of the new Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Kellerman, Poppy Z. Brite, the Transgressions anthology. At some point I’ll also be contributing a review of Don Quixote to the classics section. I recently got a copy of the new translation and I’m really looking forward to reading it.