By Adam Begley 6/28/04 12:00am

The King of Splatter Crit Lays Down His Weapon

Hatchet Jobs: Cutting Through Contemporary Literature , by Dale Peck. The New Press, 228 pages, $23.95.

Dale Peck is not the best literary critic of his generation. He’s not even second-best. It’s also true that there are pitifully few writers in his generation who could plausibly be called literary critics (the rest just write Read More

By Adam Begley 2/12/01 12:00am

A Quiet Brit’s Loud Talent: Jim Crace’s Corpse Comedy

Being Dead , by Jim Crace. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 196 pages, $21.

The literary novelists from Britain best known in the United States can be classified by decibel level: the noisy (Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson), the somewhat less noisy (A.S. Byatt, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes) and the blessedly quiet (Graham Swift, Kazuo Read More