Every new book comes with a host of wildly enthusiastic quotes from early readers hailing the author and/or their work as The Next Big Thing. But what does this hype mean for readers hoping to find their next read? Enter the discerning literary critic, whose expert distillation of a book’s composition helps us to read between the lines and sort the ‘must reads’ from the ‘not for me’s’. Author and winner of the Walkley–Pascall Award for Arts Criticism Delia Falconer (Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss), writer, essayist and poet Declan Fry, and writer and researcher Eda Gunaydin (Root and Branch) discuss the role of literary criticism in a world of hype.

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