Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs Hardcover - 2013

Media reviews

"Epically rewarding... Mr. Wolcott is among the last of the great, garrulous, generalist critics, equally at home writing about TV, movies, literature, music, comedy clubs, you name it... Critical Mass scoops up the best of his material from Vanity Fair, for which he has written since 1983, as well as pieces from outlets that range from The Village Voice, where he got his start in the 1970s, to The New Yorker, Texas Monthly and The London Review of Books, among others. It’s a vacuum-packed anthology of tight arguments and shrewd observations... Few writers can nail a performance, or an artist’s body of work, with more ecstatic economy."
—The New York Times

"Mr. Wolcott’s cultural criticism is ecstatic and alive, and this big box of his best stuff is absurdly entertaining — a rolling series of intellectual lightning strikes. Pound for pound, sentence for sentence, for a certain kind of reader, this is the book of the year."
- Dwight Garner's 10 Favorite Books of 2013, The New York Times

“For the past forty years critic James Wolcott has been a cerebral antidote to the dullness contaminating our cultural pages… There’s also tremendous value in [his] sharp-eyed seeing…in doing what critics have been doing from Aristotle to Walter Pater to Mary McCarthy to John Updike: enhancing, augmenting art and culture by helping to explain the complexity and dynamism in their DNA. Some of Wolcott’s analysis forever tweaks how you see, hear, and read.”
—The Daily Beast

"Forthright and fair-minded, but ferocious in disdain, with the sly, smart voice of someone in the know but never caught up in the moment, this collection...preserves an unforgettable of 'that New York speciality—the well-informed wise guy.'"
—Publishers Weekly

"An eclectic collection that reasserts the author's reputation as one of America's most perceptive, candid and human critics."
—Kirkus Reviews

"Wolcott is a wickedly cunning, agile writer with a special talent for quick-sketch characterizations... Critical Mass is the perfect bedside-table book because its short entries promise pleasure from even the briefest dips into its pages."
—Richmond Times-Dispatch