Taking a Page from the Dale Peck Playbook

Here's an example of the different guidelines various publications have towards book reviewing. An anonymous scribe for Publishers Weekly says A Movie...and a Book author Dennis Wagner is "a good observer of domestic and emotional detail, which will serve him well when he gets past tail-chasing why-we-write conceits and decides to tell a story straight." Over at Slate, meanwhile, Aleksandar Hemon calls the debut novel "the worst book I have ever voluntarily read."

And that's when he's being gentle. Hemon doesn't just hate the book, but the very idea of the book...and quite possibly the publisher for putting it out. Seriously, I haven't seen a review this hostile since Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat...and that's including the essays in Hatchet Job.