New at IWP Books: Desmond MacCarthy, Criticism, 1932. Chapters on Samuel Butler, George Santayana, Boswell, Literary Booms, Literary Snobs, James Joyce, Proust, Defoe, Aldous Huxley, and More. From the Chapter “A Critic’s Day Book”:

I still read for pleasure — that is a statement which would strike most people as hardly worth making. Yet I could assure them that if it caught the eye of a fellow-reviewer he would drop this book in astonishment. Very likely on second thoughts he wouldn’t believe it. Several most capable reviewers have, I happen to know, almost entirely lost the faculty of reading. They can now only read to review. Why should a gardener take up a spade unless he is going to dig, or a dentist a pair of forceps unless he is going to pull out a tooth?