Edmund Whitfield

Edmund Whitfield writes literary criticism, author profiles, and long-form essays from London, where he has worked variously as a books editor, a freelance critic for the cultural weeklies, and an occasional reader for one of the smaller literary presses. The writing collected here is the writing he wanted to read and could rarely find — pieces willing to take a position, willing to read closely, willing to argue with the books rather than merely describe them. The reviews are reviews of arguments and not of release schedules. The author profiles attempt to read the life through the work and the work through the life without flattening either. The essays on publishing concern themselves with what the contemporary industry actually does to the books it produces, not with the trade-press version of what it claims to do.

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