BuzzFeed’s New Books Editor Says He Won’t Publish Bad Reviews

Declares Isaac Fitzgerald, “Why waste breath talking smack about something? You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip. … [The online books community] understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”

But Is Literary Style Dying In Today’s Border-Crossing World?

Tim Parks: “Style, then, involves a meeting between arrangements inside the prose and expectations outside it. You can’t have a strong style without a community of readers able to recognize and appreciate its departures from the common usages they know. … Style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful.”