My neighborhood in Chicago has a delightfully high density of Little Free Libraries. Inside one of these late last year, I stumbled upon a reissue of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book that originally came out in 1936 and that has sold over 30 million copies. Curious about whether such a popular and well-known self-improvement book would be worthwhile, I scooped it up. In keeping with the assertion of this panel—that book reviews help build and sustain a strong and supportive literary community—I’m happy to say: Carnegie’s book is good! You should read it.
But if you don’t feel like it, or don’t have time, the gist of Carnegie’s argument is that a person will reach greater levels of excellence and enjoyment in any given field if they cultivate an authentic interest in the people around them, and if they work to achieve a sympathetic understanding of those people’s unique objectives and points of view. If I had to boil his arguments down to a quotation or two, I would choose one from the section on “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People,” where he says: “Give honest and sincere appreciation” and another from the section called “Six Ways to Make People Like You” where he says: “Become genuinely interested in other people.”
I teach literature and creative writing at DePaul University. In each of my classes, we discuss not only reading and writing, but also publishing: how individual works come into the world and get distributed and received. Naturally, students tend to be eager to get their work—their poems, essays, short stories, and so forth—officially published in reputable outlets where readers can find them. I offer a lot of submission tips—how to write cover letters and queries, how to compose a good author bio, how to keep a spreadsheet of where you’ve sent stuff, how to bounce back from rejection, etc. Often, my students despair that their bios are too short and unadorned—they are beginning from zero; they have no publication credits. At that point, I also teach them that in most cases, it’s easier to publish a piece about someone else than it is to publish your own original piece. If they want to have more publications in their bio, then they should pitch reviews of books they’ve read recently and loved (or at least found thought-provoking) and conversations with authors they admire.
Dale Carnegie’s haters condemn him as instructing people to suck up and flatter and manipulate to get their way. But this is a misreading; he does not do that. A misreading of my advice to my students could suggest I’m doing the same—telling them to play the game and rack up credits in order to serve themselves down the road. But that is not what I’m doing either.
As I tell my students, art is the transmission of the human spirit. Literature is made by human beings. Presumably, if you want to make art, then you are interested in the human spirit, not just your own, but other people’s. Therefore, doing a review or a podcast or a TikTok video about a book you want to talk about is not cynical, but a natural offshoot of your affection for literature and the humans who create it. Reaching out to an author you appreciate to invite them to do an interview is not obsequious resume-building, but an organic move that feeds your own growth as a participant in the arts.
The students who take me up on these suggestions typically find it rewarding. First and foremost, of course, they do get credit: a publication credit, a line on their CV, an indisputable item to include in their bio. But beyond that, they get the satisfaction of insight into another person’s writing, and a deeper relationship with that person and the literary community. Down the line, they can ask that author to blurb their debut novel or whatever, and that is awesome. But rather than some calculating quid pro quo, embarking on the path of literary criticism for these students—and anybody who does so on their own—is a way to foster human connection in a world that can never have too much of it.
I also teach my students—and would say to anyone else who asked—that even placing a book review or interview has gotten harder in recent years as literary journal budgets get cut or eliminated and as traditional review outlets like magazines and newspapers shrink and fold. But any criticism anywhere still stands to benefit both the critic and the criticized. A review on Amazon (yes, they’re dreadful, but they are where a lot of people learn about, if not buy, books) or Goodreads, a post on social media, a mention in a personal website or newsletter all go a long way toward making the person who wrote a book feel listened to and toward helping the critic learn and grow.
Reviews and interviews are a form of homework, or even exercise: like going to the brain gym and working out in ways that are pleasing unto themselves (a runner’s high but from books) and that also condition you to better your own craft. It’s also just a lot of fun to recommend things you’ve enjoyed or simply thought a lot about.
From here on in, I’m going to quote from and mention a few more authors—all of whom you should look into if you haven’t already—because one of the points of book criticism is pointing away from yourself and at another person’s work, like: look over there, check that out.
In his editor’s note to the October 2025 issue of Poetry magazine, Adrian Matejka writes of his experience in the late 90s while working at Crab Orchard Review, the magazine co-founded by the poets Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble. Jon frequently published reviews that he had written and encouraged his editorial team to do the same. Criticism, Matejka writes, was “the place where the creative and editorial brains came together.” Jon, he says, “saw criticism as an act of community building and support, which I believe is essential to an ethical or creative practice. Reading and writing about the new books for CQR is how I first encountered Terrance Hayes, A. Van Jordan, and […] Rigoberto Gonzalez.” This thrill of discovery is what I’m talking about too when I say book reviews are like homework assignments, but homework that’s fun.
As critics we provide a service—not of explanation or puzzle solving, but rather of showing the expanded possibilities for what a book could mean, what it meant to us and could thus mean to other readers. The need for this kind of interpretive work is not a shortcoming of any given piece of writing—like it’s failing to communicate and needs a translator. Rather this interpretive effort shows just how much the work could successfully communicate and why it’s art in the first place.
As the Chicago-based artist, writer, and critic Dmitry Samarov said in his newsletter on September 22, 2025: “That gap between intent and result is what makes it art rather than propaganda. The purpose of the latter is to use visual and verbal means to deliver a message, whereas the former is a blind dive into what may or may not even be water.” Being a critic means diving into the pool – exploring that gap between intent and result.
At its best, literature performs a lot of functions, but one of the things it does for the artist and the audience is to act as a machine that manufactures understanding. Literature lets you see someone—or a whole set of real or imaginary someones—as people. That seems like a low bar on one level, but on another it’s cosmic—to recognize the soul and sentience not only in another human being, but in all life and all creatures. Paying attention to something is a form of love, and art makes the creator and the receiver pay a rare and concentrated form of attention. I think that’s rad—rad as in awesome and rad as in radical. The world can feel like such a flow of trash that it can be easy to get swept sadly along. Criticism makes you slow down and stay and reflect, just like art does; good criticism makes its recipient stop and sit and feel and think.
If art is a mirror to life, then perhaps criticism is a mirror to the mirror, where all the effort an artist put into their creation and all the attention they paid to their subject gets effort and attention paid to it and both parties benefit by this exchange.
Enrichment of various kinds might be the best way to talk about the value of criticism for all involved, because—as anybody who has put a book out knows—it can be hard to balance the needs of the marketplace with the needs of the author.
In his newsletter on November 30, 2025, the poet Matthew Zapruder pondered the relationship of publishing to joy. He writes that, “So much publishing is bound up in worry, anxiety, striving: will we be published, if so by whom, and once we are, will the experience be satisfying, will our publisher be happy, will the book ‘do well,’ get reviewed, succeed, sell, win, etc. A series of unending worries. It seems that often the joy of writing gets subsumed by the needs of the marketplace, which is completely understandable and also very sad. Because I wonder if it is truly necessary.”
To me, reviewing or interviewing or posting are all ways to bring the joy to the person who wrote the book. So too are they ways to offer a chance at joy—the enjoyment of the book in question—to the readers who might not yet realize this book exists and that they should check it out. I’m not saying that all reviews must be relentlessly positive. I don’t believe in hatchet jobs, but I do think that honest opinions and assessments (including the critiques that the word criticism itself implies) are signs of actual reading and respect.
Zapruder goes on to say that while he loved working with his editor on his book How to Continue, “I did not love worrying that I was going to disappoint those people somehow if my book did not do what it was ‘supposed to do.’ But after all, what is a book supposed to do? I think it is supposed to reach the readers who need it.”
In his lecture “Imagination, Inspiration, and Evasion,” published in Harper’s in 2004 under the title “The Irresistible Beauty of All Things,” Federico Garcia Lorca says:
“The mission of the poet is just that – to give life (animar), in the exact sense of the word: to give soul.”
Done with the right amount of Carnegie-an sincerity, honesty, and interest, literary criticism from an Instagram post to a 3000-word interview can be soulful, giving voice to the immaterial essence of an author and their work.
