Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction

(Paperback)

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Description

Since the publication last year of Hatchet Jobs, the groves of literary criticism have echoed to 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 post-modernism. In the torrent of responses to this figuration, 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 with, 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 Birkets, David Foster Wallace, Philip Roth, Colson Whitehead, Jim Crace, Stanley Crouch, and Rick Moody, is available in paperback.

Reviews

"Dale Peck may have an ego the size of Montana. He may have annoyed half the known literary world with his screeds on other writers. But he may also be one of our most adventurous and singularly talented writers working today." San Francisco Chronicle

"Alive, crackling and sparkling with electric energy . . . Pecks style is classic American, a jivey mix of rhetoric and spontaneity." The Washington Post

"Peck challenges received critical wisdom with energy, fire, and unmitigated gall. Behind the loudmouth cynicism is an idealist whod open a hill of literary oysters in search of a single pearl." The Boston Globe

Author Bio

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 an O. Henry award.