Critical reflection

Congratulations to Matt Trueman, whose Edinburgh Fringe reviews for CW have won him the 2009 Allen Wright Award for the best reviewer aged 30 or under covering the festival. It’s a well-deserved award, and we hope for more of the same as CW brings on further new writing talent. This week, Simon Watt discovers why music festival reviews slide from critical appraisal into Kerouacian narrative, while back at the Fringe, Cara Bleiman ponders the role of music criticism in Starbucks. And looking more broadly at the relationship between journalism, commerce and politics, Sarah Boyes reviews Robert W McChesney’s The Political Economy of Media.

Meanwhile, Sarah Boyes also reviews Ismail Kadare’s Chronicles in Stone, and explores the appeal of ‘dissident fiction’ in a post-ideological English-speaking world. And Wes Brown looks forward to Martin Amis’ new novel, wondering whether he will at last break out of his postmodern insularity.