Hatchet Jobs ― Writings on Contemporary Fiction

Since the publication of 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, voiceseven fistshave 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 nastythey 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.