I know: the last thing you need is another excuse to spend more time on the internet. But trust me on this one. Wyatt Mason, one of the very best practical critics working today, has started a blog at Harper’s called Sentences, and it’s going to be good. Here’s how Mason describes the blog’s focus:

Appearing several times a week, Sentences will not patrol the publishing industry, nor other literary blogs. Rather, it will be devoted, for the most part, to things I’ve been reading lately, new and old, and the ideas such reading stimulates.

Particular attention will be paid to the particulars of writing, the pieces and parts upon which the enterprise depends for its effects. General questions, too, about literary endeavor, will crop up, questions I’ll try to address in a useful way. My aim is to make the posts a continuation, if in a different form, of the writing that I’ve been doing in Harper’s and elsewhere for the past few years.

Mason’s profile page at Harper’s has links to much of his previous work. If you don’t know it, check it out.