Book description
The most wanted, the most feared, the most hated, the most powerful
job in journalism: being a reviewer means writing about something you
love and getting paid for it. So for a lot of people it's the NO 1
dream job in the media. Whether your passion is film, music, books,
visual arts or the stage, you can get closer to it as a reviewer and
establish a career in one of the most influential roles open to a
writer. A great review will be read by millions, and writing it calls
for a high degree of skill. Based on a lifelong passion, packed into a
few hundred words and often written in less than an hour, a review
makes heavy demands on writer's technique and experience. This book
explains how to seize your readers' attention and how to be witty
always, fascinating most of the time and bitchy when you need to be.
Reviews from classic writer like Pauline Kael or Kenneth Tynan are
contrasted with today's hot names including Mark Kermode and Stewart
Maconie. We look back at the history of the critic and some of the
groundbreaking groups who have shaped our culture, including Dorothy
Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, the French New Wave directors
who founded Les Cahiers du CInema and London's celebrated Modern
Review, founded by Julie Burchill, Toby Young and Cosmo Landesman.
Celia Brayfield spent seven happy years as a television critic on The
Times in London. She has also reviewed regularly for BBC radio and TV
programmes including Newsnight and Front Row as well as publications
including the Evening Standard and New Statesman. Building on her caree
as a reviewer she then became a novelist. Now the author of nine novels
and four non- fiction books, she has also experienced reviewing from the
artist's side. She is now the Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel
University.
