false 48855623 323002 55 1595580271 9781595580276 8 http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156871823m/55.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1156871823s/55.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55.Hatchet_Jobs_Writings_on_Contemporary_Fiction 3.24 42 Hatchet Jobs, the groves of literary criticism have echoed with the clatter of steel on wood. From heated panels at BookExpo America in Chicago to contretemps at writers' watering holes in New York, voices—even fists—have been raised.

Peck's bracing philippic proposes that contemporary literature is at a dead end. Novelists have forfeited a wider audience, succumbing to identity politicking and self-reflexive postmodernism. In the torrent of responses to this fulguration, opinions were not so much divided as cleaved in two with, for example, Carlin Romano contending that "Peck's judgements are worse than nasty—they are hysterical" and Benjamin Schwarz retorting that "in his meticulous attention to diction, his savage wit, his exact and rollicking prose and his disdain for pseudo-intellectual flatulence, Dale Peck is Mencken's heir."

Now Hatchet Jobs, with its swinging critiques of the work of, among others, Sven Birkerts, David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Jim Crace, Stanley Crouch, and Rick Moody, is available in paperback.]]> 20 3.65 554 139 2004 3 0 false Tue Mar 10 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Tue Mar 10 17:09:53 -0700 2009 Wed Mar 11 10:51:39 -0700 2009 Don't read this and then try to write anything, ever.

The first piece is hilarious, a long-deserved crucifixion of the unconscionably boring Sven Birkerts; but then I stopped laughing when I hit the subsequent reviews, in which he CARVES INTO Wallace, Franzen, Moody, DeLillo, et al....more...]]>