Literary blogs: an example

There are blogs about everything, and literature is, of course, no exception. I said that I would point you in the direction of one or two literary or intellectual blogs as examples of tone: internet writing that is looser than you would find in an academic essay but still rigorous and articulate. Of course, there may not be anything essentially web-based about this kind of writing. You could find equally good models in print journalism about books and ideas, such as you might read in the reviews section of a good newspaper, like The Guardian's books section, or The Australian Literary Review.

Here is one to start off with: Mark Athitakis' American Fiction Notes. Athitakis mostly posts reviews and opinions about contemporary American writers there, as well as more broadly-themed pieces on the state of American letters and the publishing industry. What I like about it, apart from the fact that he is a good writer and a perceptive reader, is that he usually anchors his criticism in particular examples and words and passages quoted from the text, as in this piece on Jonathan Franzen's Freedom.