Hatchet Jobs

Writings on Contemporary Fiction

Dale Peck

paperback

$14.95 / £8.99

The Lester Bangs of literary criticism.
—TIME OUT NEW YORK

The Lizzie Borden of American literary criticism.
—SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN

Since the publication last year of Hatchet Jobs, the groves of literary criticism have echoed with the clatter of steel on wood. From heated panels at Book Expo 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 judgments 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 pseudointellectual 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.

Dale Peck is the author of three widely acclaimed novels—Now It’s Time to Say Goodbye, The Law of Enclosures, and Martin and John— and a memoir, What We Lost. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two O. Henry awards. He lives in New York City.