LibGuides: TC 303: Reading & Composition in World Literature / Grumberg: Find reviews (primary sources)

Book reviews

A book review is written at the time of the book's publication and again if it is translated. There are entire publications devoted to book reviews and they also appear in newspapers and magazines. Book reviews are popular sources and are written by a wide range of writers, such as professional critics, other authors and domain experts.

Reach out to me if you need to dig a little deeper into these resources or you need other suggestions.

Search tips:

Gather bibliographic information (title, author, date of original publication) for the book you’re researching.
If you are seeking reviews of a book in translation, keep in mind that you need to know what year the book was translated, which is rarely the same year in which it was published.
Translated works will be reviewed in publications that are written in the language the book is translated into. If you are interested in how a book was received when it was translated into Portuguese, you should know how to read Portuguese.
For reviews, narrow the date range to the years immediately following the book’s publication.
Some databases will allow you to limit your search to reviews or criticism, so always check the advanced search options.

Where to Find Books Reviews

Academic Search Complete
You may limit to book reviews in this database to weed out scholarly sources.

Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Nexis Uni
You may limit to book reviews in this vast database of newspapers and magazines. Ask a librarian for help.

Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Effective January 1, 2018, Nexis Uni™ replaces LexisNexis Academic.

New York Times Book Reviews
reviews of popular books from The New York Times (recent)

New York Times (Historical)
1851 - 2013. Unlimited users.

Updated annually. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1851. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.
Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive
Book reviews only.

The complete online fully-searchable edition of the Times Literary Supplement from the first edition in 1902 to 5 years ago. This is the essential companion for studying and researching literary activity and critical opinion makers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since 1902, the TLS has scrutinized, applauded and dissected the work of leading writers and thinkers, offering comprehensive coverage of the most important publications, in every subject, in several languages, as well as reviewing current theatre, cinema, music, and exhibitions.

Definitions

Book reviews typically offer an opinion of a book’s quality or value rather than an in-depth analysis of the work, and tend to be shorter than literary criticism. Reviews are usually written within a year or two of a book’s publication.

Literary criticism is the scholarly evaluation, explanation, and analysis of literature. It can be written at any time, even centuries after the publication of the literature it critiques. Literary criticism is often found in scholarly journals or books.

Foreign language press

Many of the databases at left have language limiters. Searching for primary sources in non-english sources is tough - ask a librarian for help.

Latin American Newsstand
Only reliably back to 2005.

Updated daily. Provides full text access to 41 newspapers from Puerto Rico and 11 Latin American countries with complete articles in ASCII format. Includes papers from Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. Content is in Spanish and Portuguese.
Key newspaper titles include El Universal, Mexico City's largest-selling newspaper; O Globo (Brazil); La Nacion (Argentina); and El Mercurio (Chile). Three business titles, El Economista (Mexico), Valor Economico (Brazil), and Portafolio (Colombia) are also important resources for researchers.
A complete title list is available.
Latin American Newspapers
1805-1922.

Provides more than 35 fully searchable newspapers published in the 19th and 20th centuries from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela and elsewhere. Covers the people, issues and events that shaped this vital region.
LAN represents the first collection of the World Newspaper Archive, a partnership between the Center for Research Librariesa community and Readex, a division of NewsBank, to systematically create an extensive Web-based collection of international newspapers. CRL will guarantee the long-term availability of this news content for the CRL community.