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    Arts Reviews: And How to Write Them
    Arts Reviews: And How to Write Them
    Arts Reviews: And How to Write Them
    Ebook172 pages1 hour

    Arts Reviews: And How to Write Them

    By Celia Brayfield

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    About this ebook

    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 can 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 a writer's technique and experience. This book explains how to seize readers' attention and how to be witty always, fascinating most of the time, and bitchy when you need to be. Reviews from classic writers like Pauline Kael or Kenneth Tynan are contrasted with today's hot names such as Mark Kermode and Stewart Maconie. The history of the critic is examined, including 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. Interviews with successful journalists and commissioning editors from the NME and The Guardian about breaking into the field are also included.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCreative Essentials
    Release dateMay 28, 2008
    ISBN9781842434185
    Arts Reviews: And How to Write Them
    Author

    Celia Brayfield

    Celia Brayfield is a novelist and cultural commentator. She is the author of nine novels. The latest, Wild Weekend explores the tensions in a Suffolk village in homage to Oliver Goldmsith's She Stoops to Conquer. To explore suburban living, she created the community of Westwick and explored mid-life manners in Mr Fabulous And Friends, and the environmental implications of urbanisation in Getting Home. She has often juxtaposed historical and contemporary settings, notably eighteenth century Spain in Sunset, pre-revolutionary St Petersburg in White Ice and Malaysia in the time of World War II in Pearls. Four of her novels have been optioned by major US, UK or French producers. Her non-fiction titles include two standard works on the art of writing: Arts Reviews (Kamera Books, 2008) and Bestseller (Fourth Estate, 1996.) Her most recent is Deep France (Pan, 2004) a journal of a year she spent writing in south-west France. She has served on the management committee of The Society of Authors and judged national literary awards including the Betty Trask Award and the Macmillan Silver PEN Prize. A former media columnist, she contributes to The Times, BBC Radio 4 and other national and international media.

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    Reviews for Arts Reviews

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    • 3/5
      Is it fair to write a review about a book on writing reviews? Perhaps not, but I will attempt the feat nonetheless. In this work, British author Celia Brayfield offers her readers wisdom and experiences from her career of writing arts reviews for periodicals. (She has since moved on to writing full books.)

      She spends first eight of the ten chapters sharing the rules of the road for writing arts reviews. She fills in these rules with examples from her life experience. While this was interesting at first, I grew tired of hearing story after story. I wanted Brayfield to put forth an argument or, at the very least, to cite someone else who is putting forth an argument. Without a strong central narrative, the book seemed to ramble at times. Being more familiar with the American arts scene than the British one, I had trouble sifting through the unfamiliar names.

      Although I thought about putting the book down as I labored through the chapters, the last two chapters redeemed it to me. In the next-to-last chapter, Brayfield provides a detailed history of arts reviews. She displays erudition about the major writers who shaped our perception of this practice. In the last chapter, she provides helpful and practical advice for starting out in the field. Such pragmatism is always welcomed.

      I wish she would have taken the perspective of writing to help the reader understand how to perfect the art instead of just sharing story upon story. This book is not a total failure as the last two chapters illustrate. Still, it could have been stronger to meet my desires and my American cultural experience.

    Book preview

    Arts Reviews - Celia Brayfield

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