[Click above for audio of me reading this review.]
Sometimes reviewers make a choice to cut deep and hard, just because they can, and because someone is letting them. Especially when there’s no other way to take in a review, given the evidence, than that it is tailor-made to diminish you as a whole person. Or maybe also to flood the reviewer themselves with the thrill of shouting someone into contrition—all the while remaining pretty indifferent to what it is that you’re actually arguing in this book you wrote.
A recent review of my Literature in Late Monolingualism (appearing in the Edinburgh University Press journal Translation and Literature this month) was that kind of gut punch. It was endlessly exasperated by my voice and style, but it also couldn’t find a thing among my claims or arguments in the book to refute—and so its criticisms luxuriated almost entirely on the level of tone and feeling. In the end, I was lumped in with David Foster Wallace as “another producer of migraine reads.”
The reviewer can’t help themselves, it seems, but launch into overdrive with a bunch of below-the-belt punches at me (about my pronouns, about my Instagram account, which I’ve subsequently deactivated, about the people whom I dedicate the book to, about the Indigenous land acknowledgement I open with, and then about me being allegedly a “child losing interest in their new Lego set even before it has been fully assembled”, etc.). All this, more or less for the glee of these various anti-woke insinuations themselves.
Speaking of childishness though: what kind of clownish jab is it for a full Professor of English it to find fault with a colleague for the fact that Internet search engines mix up one of their core concepts (in my case, the linguacene) with “linguine”? What is that?
Edinburgh University Press, and the journal’s editors, found all this spiteful personal aspersion suitable to print; I suppose in the spirit of academic freedom, or something. The review even closes with the damning but obvious fact—who among us knew this will be the comparison awaiting us when we get out of bed and write a scholarly book in 2025?—that “David Gramling is no [Percy Bysshe] Shelley.”
Omg, Percy Shelley. What a failure I must be. I did laugh at that one, but honestly this all was just so sad to read—and then to go on and do the rest of my day job, teaching German and literature to 200 students who also deserve all my undivided and respectful attention. Overwhelmingly, I do accept the hundreds of rejections and criticisms I get on things I’ve written, as just a run-of-the-mill hazard of being alive and employed in a humanities field—and, frequently, as helpful guides for personal and professional improvement. But this was different, and the old 1990s PR adage “Don’t platform it; don’t give it more oxygen” just wouldn’t cut it for me anymore. The only way I could see my way through the moral diminishment was to read the piece aloud to friends and share it—not in a mocking or ironic tone, but in my own voice as I experience it as an actual person. And then, to tell you how it really feels.
I think the review’s implied moral upshot is something like: “I can’t even figure out what this book is for, and I’m feeling put upon for having to read it, and so will you. So let’s agree ahead of time the author is a menace of some sort.” This hurts, of course, but it is also a dodge, an opportunistic disingenuity. The result is something anti-intellectual, tightfisted, gracelessly aggrieved, opportunistically superior… barely a “book review” so much as a “person review” or a “transparency audit” or even a “wellness check”.
I, too, struggle with others’ styles and logics all the time, including those of writers and thinkers from whom I still truly want to learn (Bernard Stiegler, for instance). Many psychoanlaytic writers (André Green, Paul Bové)—who are better stylists and analysts than I—write prose that is often beyond my wit and attentiveness, and so I have to figure out how just to put the book down for a while and give it some air, knowing that those authors aren’t punking or aggrieving me in some way. They’re just different. Put down the book. Read another book. Talk to someone you like, or love, for a while. That is the solution: not impugning the author’s personal integrity with pot shots, under colour of condemning jargonism and excessive neologism.
But let’s get real: this book I wrote isn’t some kind of deconstructionist’s pleasuredome, begging for a brick. Every one of its 3039 sentences has an identifiable subject, predicate, and purpose. And I rest assured in 2025 that any old LLM—any Large Language Model, not any piece of “literature in late monolingualism”—will gladly produce for us in under five seconds a range of plain-language versions of this or any other book, if that’s what the reviewer wants to review instead. I’m happy to send the PDF.
If, in 2026, anyone is tempted to write something like this for a journal (or even a Yelp review) about someone they’ve never met, I would ask: why? And then I’d suggest, don’t—unless they are obviously a bad person, and the evidence suggests they really need to be brought low for others’ protection. I have never taken a swing at a colleague in this way, and I hope never to have to. People are always worth more respect than that, even—and perhaps especially—strangers with a different style and experience than yours.
[final edit, Dec 25, 2025]
