I like reviews where you are on this journey with a critic, watching them. What makes criticism so exciting is that you get to see somebody think in real time. You're staging an argument also for the reader in that space. I feel like as i'm writing and thinking, then the kind of critical judgment begins to emerge. So you're sort of like figuring out what you think as you write. Ye i think, i only think when i'm writing. I think it just goes blank when i'm not ritin.
Parul Sehgal, a former a book critic for The New York Times, is now a staff writer at The New Yorker.
“My job is I think to be honest with the reader and to keep surfacing new ways for me and for other people to think about books. New vocabularies of pleasure and disgust.”
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