Best First Paragraph of a Book Review Ever

When you read this, you know that you are in for one hell of a ride:

I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.

—Patricia Lockwood in London Review of Books

Just in case you are wondering, while many admire the author’s prose, it also considered to be extremely misogynistic by many.

H/t Naked Capitalism for finding this 2019 gem.

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