The nation’s book critics naturally congregated when Don DeLillo’s slim new book appeared. In the latest Open Letters Peer Review, John Rodwan supplies a scorecard for the players.

The vituperation that greeted Martin Amis’ collection of essays The Second Plane reached singularly quotable proportions, even for this much-vituperated British author. In our regular feature, John G. Rodwan Jr. casts a cold eye on Amis’ dour detractors.

Near the punchbowl, within reach of the finger sandwiches, the early critics of James Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning had an oh-so-polite set of things to say about it. Out back in the alley, other critics were ready to pounce. In this regular feature, Sam Sacks officiates between the Sharks and the Jets.

A.I. White has burrowed into twenty-three reviews of J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year and in this regular feature alerts us to which critics succeeded in their charge, which failed, and why

James Wood, Christopher Hitchens, Michiko Kakutani, and many others have competed to put forth the definitive word on Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost. Sam Sacks is off to the races with them in this regular feature.

In our regular feature, Hugh Merwin tucks in to the reviews of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which alternately acclaim and castigate the bellwether bestseller.

In our regular feature, Joanna Scutts is judge and jury over the reviewers of Günter Grass’s Peeling the Onion, who rather too frequently forgot they were supposed to be considering a book.

In our monthly feature, Sam Sacks clambers over the mountain of
reviews of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, spotting perspicacity,
purple prose, and possible pickpocketing along the way.

Newspaper book pages are under threat. In our monthly feature, John Cotter assesses the reviews of Jonathan Lethem’s novel You Don’t Love Me Yet to learn what (if anything) in our print reviews is worth saving.

In this monthly feature, Steve Donoghue spots a troubling pattern of left-handed praise in the reviews of Robert Fagles new translation of the Aeneid

In this monthly feature, Sam Sacks surveys the reviews of Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium, which caused some confused tail-chasing amongst its critics.

In this monthly feature, John Cotter reviews the reviewers of Martin Amis’s House of Meetings, from the gossip-slingers to the fellow fiction writers.